Change in action: Air-raiding villages and killing civilians

keeping d&d civil my ass, way to try to rub salt into the wounds. do you have to politicize everything?

 

Double post, but "keeping D&D civil" aside, what Obama is doing in Pakistan is disappointing but justifiable. I can't really condone it but I can see the necessity, given the total mess Afghanistan is now thanks to eight years or so of mismanagement. Nevertheless, if Obama continues to embrace policies that put civilians in danger, it's definitely a blemish upon his record. Let's just hope this situation is unique (although given the hurdles Obama faces, I sincerely doubt it).

 

basso, why do you hate the troops? They are keeping America safe, you should support them instead of bashing everything that they do. Questioning the troops is supporting the enemy. Why do you love the terrorists so much and want our troops to fail?

Shame on you basso, shame on you.

 

Right, but my question was how many of those people were actual non-combatant civilians, versus militants. "people" does not equal "civilians".

 

A few things.

1. It is unfortunate if any civilians were killed.

2. Before Bush there had to be 90% certainty that the intel was correct before making a strike like this. Bush lowered the threshold to as low as 50%. If basso was concerned about civilian deaths I would have liked to seem speak out against that BUSH policy. If basso has no problem with that, then he shouldn't be upset about this. After all 1 out of every 2 times the attacks will be against innocent civilians.

3. Obama said he didn't want the policy to be just the air strikes. That means it could be air strikes coordinated with other efforts.

4. The article doesn't say how many civilians were killed.

5. It's odd to see basso backing the goals of this Islamist party in Pakistan.

6. The idea of having the policy but not announcing that's the policy is the stupidest argument ever. I repeat... It is the stupidest argument ever.

The reason is that unless there is only one strike, the policy will be known once it is put to use. So there is no point in keeping the policy secret to begin with. Immediately after striking Pakistan once because of actionable intel, there is no more keeping it secret. So the idea that it would be a good policy but wasn't wise to talk about it ahead of time is pointless, and not really a strategic issue at all.

 

I miss the part where it says the people killed were civilians...it seems we don't know exactly who or what was hit as of this moment.

 

I think Obama is just as dumb as bush. He better not start a war in Pakistan. I hope he learned something from Iraq and Afghanistan.

 

So you support the policy of launching attacks in Pakistan. Why are you now criticizing Obama since he is continuing that policy?

 

You can rest easy. He won't "start a war with Pakistan," certainly not unless the government falls and the country is taken over by Islamic extremists, in which case, I would want him to take out their nukes, and to the devil with the details. President Obama (boy, it is fun to type that!) will be doing everything as covertly as possible. Covert drone missile strikes, possibly covert special forces raids, but only if the target is absolutely known and is very high value (Osama or his top associates). That's my opinion, anyway, and I don't have a problem with it. I'd prefer that this was in concert with the Pakistani government, but they are riddled with people who have sympathy for the Taliban, especially the intelligence services, which makes things very hard, to say the least.

The vast majority of the population of Pakistan simply want peace and prosperity, and are moderate. Somehow, we must help them. It is a maddenly difficult situation. How do you fight the enemy where they are without angering the general population? To use an example from a completely different thread, how would we feel if the Mexican government did "covert" operations against Mexican extremists hiding in Texas? We would be pissed off, even if there were no civilian dead and injured, to put it mildly.

 

I think its obvious that the US has some sort of wink - wink deal with the Pakistani's where the US can act unilaterally to target high value targets on their side of the border. These strikes started under the Bush Administration and seems like it will continue under President Obama's Administration also.

The US gets to continue killing the bad guys while the Pakistani Government has a couple less radical Muslims to deal with, without getting the blame for taking them out either.

 

Your post sounds reasonable. However, this is looking more and more like our initial invasion of Afghanistan was a wrong move, though it felt good at the time. Supporting our war lords against the Taliban has not done much good and we did not even get Bin Laden. Pakistan was relatively peaceful and now we have essentially started a civil war in Pakistan, a country way to big, and with nuclear arms, for us to occupy.

I think that we need to error on the side of caution. With these strikes Obama may be telling Pakistan and the Middle East that he is not that different. This is not something we should want.

Think of how the trillions we wasted in Iraq could have been used to modernize and moderate Pakistan. It would be interesting to see what is the current ratio of military expenditure in Afghanistan and Pakistan to military aid. I think that we are always cheap skates on aid , except we spend tremendously on war and military aid.

 

A good article that questions Obama's decision to bomb Pakistan.

Obama's Vietnam?
Friday's airstrikes are evidence Obama will take the hard line he promised in Pakistan and Afghanistan. But he should remember what happened to another president who inherited a war.

By Juan Cole


Jan. 26, 2009 | On Friday, President Barack Obama ordered an Air Force drone to bomb two separate Pakistani villages, killing what Pakistani officials said were 22 individuals, including between four and seven foreign fighters. Many of Obama's initiatives in his first few days in office -- preparing to depart Iraq, ending torture and closing Guantánamo -- were aimed at signaling a sharp turn away from Bush administration policies. In contrast, the headline about the strike in Waziristan could as easily have appeared in December with "President Bush" substituted for "President Obama." Pundits are already worrying that Obama may be falling into the Lyndon Johnson Vietnam trap, of escalating a predecessor's halfhearted war into a major quagmire. What does Obama's first military operation tell us about his administration's priorities?

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/01/26/obama/index.html

 

The main problem with Afghanistan wasn't that we invaded - it was that we half-assed it so we could go play in Iraq.

Pakistan has never been stable, and it's not really any worse off now than it was before 9/11. Musharraf took power in a coup in 1999 - that doesn't happen in peaceful, stable countries.

 

The funny thing is that this is specifically an Obama policy that Bush actually co-opted last year. Obama said he would move on militants inside Pakistan's borders, while McCain said he would follow Bin Laden to the gates of hell, but not into Pakistan. A few months later, we learn that Bush adopted this policy and started firing strikes into Pakistan also.

So agree with it or not, it's not a Bush policy that Obama is continuing.

 

^ Thanks for the article. There's conflicting sources about the victims:

[rquoter]The tribal notable Khalil Dawar, who lived near the village of Mir Ali in Pakistan's North Waziristan Agency, hosted a party of five alleged al-Qaida operatives in the guesthouse on his property. An American drone hit the site with three Hellfire missiles. According to the Pakistani press, the strike not only killed the four Arab fighters and a Punjabi militant, but also the Pashtun host and some of his family members. A few hours later, missiles slammed into another residence near the village of Wana in a nearby tribal agency, South Waziristan, killing 10. Pakistani sources disagreed over whether there had been any foreign fighters at all at the second target, with locals claiming that 10 family members, including women and children, were the only victims. Villagers in Pakistan's northwestern tribal belt sometimes rent to the Arab fighters because they are sympathetic to their struggle, but sometimes they just need the money.[/rquoter]

Considering that a large part of Obama's base consist of the anti-war crowd, I wonder how he'll explain this stuff. News travels much faster these days, particularly for the internet-savvy younger generation that voted him into office.

 

A few things:

1. Anti-war and Anti-Iraq are two very different things. The mission in Afghanistan and AQ has much higher support than Iraq.

2. He's always stated he was going to shoot missiles into the tribal regions of Pakistan if Pakistan wasn't able to go after that region. This is an area that's not even under the control of the Pakistan government. There should be nothing surprising about this policy. In fact, the criticism he took on it was from the right, not the left.

 

It's still a delicate balancing act. Obama does not want to get caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Look how many supported invading Iraq before we actually did it...

 

I would argue that there's a large segment of the left that actually took a principled stance against the war in Iraq. Some were against it for political reasons, and some for tactical reasons. But for those who had a moral objection (and I agree that there were very few of them in the media or in Washington), I think many of them will be less than thrilled if US efforts in Afghanistan and Pakistan turn more violent, to the detriment of the local populations. We'll see.