Christmas For Children

(10 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

December 22, 2010

Channel 4 News

The number of drone strikes in Pakistan, believed to be led by the CIA, has doubled under the Obama administration in 2010 – leading to hundreds of deaths. Channel 4 News maps a secret war.

In the last 12 months there have been at least 113 attacks by secret US drones in Pakistan‘s mountainous Waziristan region.

It is double the number of strikes in 2009, which itself saw a dramatic spike, bringing the total number of attacks under President Obama to an estimated figure of 166. That marks an increase of nearly 300 per cent compared with the last four years of the Bush presidency.

In the sights of these unmanned spy planes (UAVs) are Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders held responsible for unrest and attacks on coalition troops in the long-running Afghanistan war.

As a result of the 2010 drone surge, there have been 500-900 known deaths. Of these, media reports suggest the majority were militant fighters.

But Channel 4 News has found that women and children – some with alleged links to militants – have also perished while the sheer number of drone flights have caused “panic and terror” among ordinary tribespeople. It is clear that a changing strategy has often put villages rather than remote hideouts in the firing line.

In a recent study by the Campaign for Innocent Victims of Conflict (CIVIC), report author Christopher Rogers said: “It’s almost certain that US drone strikes are causing more civilian casualties than the US has thus far admitted”.

December 23, 2010

For CIA drone warriors, the future is death

By Pepe Escobar

Forget the iPad; the ultimate icon of fetishized commodity is the drone. Israelis do it – and sell them like hot cakes. Mexicans do it – to patrol their side of the border. Brazilians wanna do it – to patrol the Rio favelas. Saudis wanna do it. Uzbeks wanna do it. Everybody’s singing: Let’s do it. Let’s fall in love (with the drone).

Furthermore, abandon all hope those who enter (the doors of misperception): Afghanistan is now officially just a lowly, troop-infested sideshow to the AfPak war. The real thing is an illegal drone war against Pakistan. Viva Richard Nixon. As much as Tricky Dick annexed Cambodia to the Vietnam War, the Barack Obama administration pulled a Nixon regarding Pakistan. And the great thing is that no one needs another WikiLeaks “dump” to know this. It’s out there in the open.

Tricky Dick’s tricks paved the way to Year Zero for the Khmer Rouge. Obama’s throw of the dice may be paving the way to a Year Zero for the Pashtun brotherhood. The 16-agency US intelligence establishment says the Afghan adventure is doomed. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is somewhat gloomy. But the surge-addicted White House – in a stark reminder of those George W Bush-era reports about Iraq – says it’s all swell (Taliban “momentum has been arrested in much of the country”). Pentagon supremo Robert Gates says Washington now controls more Afghan territory than a year ago; maybe in terms of Kabul shopping malls – and that’s already a stretch.

Taliban momentum, anyway, is just an afterthought. What matters for the White House is to smash (“significant progress”) al-Qaeda, allegedly holed up not in Afghanistan but in Pakistan’s tribal areas. Take them Pakistani Talibs out from the air, with the CIA playing Ride of the Valkyries, just like in an orgiastic Facebook-friendly remix of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, with all those US Marine tanks rolling along in Helmand province offering a cute counterpart. I love the smell of a burning Talib in the morning. Makes me think of … re-election.

But what about collateral damage? Tough guys of the “real men go to Tehran” type say this is for sissies (the New America Foundation says around a third of drone deaths are civilians, but that’s hugely underestimated, according to Pakistani sources.) Blowback, anyway, is guaranteed to last until the 22nd century.

[snip]

The TAPI inter-government agreement was finally signed in mid-December. Make no mistake; this is Washington in overdrive. The Washington-backed Asian Development Bank is to come up with the bulk of the $7.6 billion (and counting) financial package. The 2,000 kilometer-long TAPI – to be built by an international consortium – should snake through a very dodgy 735 kilometers of Afghanistan and 800 kilometers of Pakistan.

[snip]

And here’s where The Year of the Drone merges with what the late, great deconstructionist Jacques Lacan would qualify as “the unsayable”: the invisible, dangerous liaisons between the “war on terror” and the energy war, as in the topography of the war on terror matching all the key 21st-century sources of energy from the Middle East to Central Asia.



[snip]

TAPI theoretically should be finished by 2014. Surprise! That’s exactly the deadline year (for now …) for American troops to exit Afghanistan. No one will be exiting anything. Finally, the whole AfPak imbroglio will be revealed for what it is; a Pipelineistan gambit.

Meanwhile, enjoy the Year of the Drone. And while we’re at it, here’s some breaking news. The 2011 Pentagon/NATO strategy for AfPak is already established: wait for the Taliban spring/summer offensive to see where they’re at. And then drone them to death. Call it Drone Eye for the Bad Guy.

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