Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will: NYTimes

[fatman17]

July 30, 2012


Our Dark Side

The Bomb and the Drone

by ED KINANE


The lessons of Hiroshima and Nagasaki belong always before us. The agony of those two cities must remain our dark beacon.

Hiroshima/Nagasaki wasn’t so much about targets as about audiences. We – or rather, the very highest reaches of the US government – annihilated a couple hundred thousand nameless, unarmed, undefended human beings to warn the world: “Don’t mess with us; we run things now.”

Thanks to its atomic prowess – showcased at H/N – for over 65 years the US has been able to hold the planet hostage. It deploys nuclear blackmail to further its corporations’ grip on the world’s resources and markets. But such gunboat diplomacy has only partially succeeded.

The Soviets soon acquired the Bomb. For nearly four decades that other evil empire terrorized us here in our previously invincible Homeland. So the pitiless logic of proliferation made us all far less safe.

The Big Lie(s)

Every August 6 letters to editors perpetuate the last century’s most enduring myth: the Bomb forced the fanatic, loathsome Japs to surrender. Japan would not have to be invaded. Thousands of G.I. lives were thereby saved. Thank God for the Bomb!

Never mind that by spring 1945, the US Air Force ruled Japanese skies. Never mind that after merciless firebombing, Japan’s major cities now lay in ashes, their people incinerated. Never mind that the US Navy ruled the sea; not a grain of rice could penetrate its blockade. Never mind that Japan was totally depleted by years of war. Never mind that Japan had already been seeking surrender.

Mr. Truman and the generals could have accepted Japan’s one nonnegotiable demand: to treat its divine emperor with respect. Alternatively, they could have let Japan dangle for as long as it took and then swept in to feed the emaciated and bury the dead.

Afghanistan/Pakistan/Yemen echo Hiroshima/Nagasaki. With its new cutting edge technology the Pentagon still trots out the old myth: the Reaper drone is all about “saving our boys’ lives.” And Bomb-like, the Reaper proclaims: “If you defy us, wherever you are, we will hunt you down and kill you.” Déjà vu.

Once again, clandestinely and without referendum, the Pentagon has embarked on a new era of terror. To add menace to dread, its robotic warfare comes with almost preternatural surveillance…both over there and, soon, here.

For several years the Pentagon has used high-tech robots like the Predator and the Reaper, not only for surveillance, but to blow up people and things in Afghanistan. Defying international law, the CIA uses the Reaper to assassinate nameless “bad guys” in Pakistan. In Yemen the Reaper perpetrates extrajudicial executions and even hunts down and kills US citizens. That’s what happens when your name somehow appears on White House “kill lists” reviewed by Mr. Obama himself.

The “beauty” of it is that technicians, wielding joysticks at satellite-linked computers thousands of miles from combat, pilot these unmanned drones. They can deliver – “with laser accuracy” – their Hellfire missiles and 500-pound bombs. And do so with scant knowledge of their non-combatant victims and with no physical risk. Can anything be more disdainful of honor, more disdainful of life?

Mission Creep

The Reaper – piloted from, among other places, our local Hancock Air Base – has become the Pentagon’s and the CIA’s darling. With no on-board crew, no US personnel die when the Reaper crashes or is hacked or shot down. With few witnesses, with no maimed vets and no awkward body bags shipped home, few ask: Why are we there? Who benefits? What’s our complicity? What’s become of our humanity?

So opaque is our bubble, so pervasive is the distancing, so unaccountable is drone warfare, that mission creep is guaranteed. Mission creep: the slide into perpetual warfare.

Like Japan’s hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties, the Reaper’s civilian casualties in Afghanistan/Pakistan/Yemen fail to matter. Few ask: What’s the human cost? What’s the blowback? We forget that victims anywhere surely have survivors nursing enduring hatred for the US. But – hey, not to worry! – those further security threats keep the pot boiling. And General Atomics, Lockheed and other corporate war profiteers continue to reap their billions.

One day drone missiles may strike Hancock Air Base. And if nearby communities are hit…well, aren’t we very accepting of “collateral damage”? Thanks to the Pentagon’s love affair with death – and thanks to the trillions we squander on “defense” – the world is much safer…for corporate greed. Most dare not allow themselves to see how those military contracts ravage our already depressed economy.

Fifty nations reportedly are either importing or manufacturing their own drones. This past spring the U.S. sold six weaponized drones to Italy – Italy?! Like nuclear proliferation, drone proliferation will haunt us till the end of our days.

Unless….

Ed Kinane is an anti-militarism activist based in Syracuse, New York. He’s one of the “Hancock 2,” the “Hancock 33,” the “Hancock 15,” and the “Hancock 38.” Reach him at edkinane@verizon.net.

 

[fatman17]

September 25, 2012

A CounterPunch Special Report

Living (and Dying) Under Drones


by ANDREW COCKBURN



Last week, the Obama Administration argued in front of the First Circuit Court of Appeals that there is no official evidence we are waging drone warfare in northern Pakistan. The ACLU has sued under the Freedom of Information Act for details of the widely reported drone strikes and in response, the CIA simply stated that it could neither confirm or deny that they were happening at all. The government has of course released lots of information about the strikes, but always in the form of leaks, anonymous and self serving. According to the leakers, the strikes are a miracle of precision, waged with a concern for the protection of innocent bystanders that would have done credit to Mahatma Gandhi.

To a considerable extent the media has taken this story as given, dwelling instead on the political consequences of the strikes on our relationship with Pakistan, or other subsidiary issues. The actual effects of an escalating eight year bombardment of Hellfire missiles on a society living in mud houses on an average per capita income of $250 has attracted less scrutiny.

Living Under Drones, an exhaustively researched and documented study by the New York University Law School Global Justice Clinic and Stanford Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic released today, does much to explain the government’s reluctance to come clean.

The report makes it clear that there have indeed been many undeniably innocent civilian casualties — presenting an upper figure of almost 900 killed, many of them children. On March 17, 2011, for example, village elders and other local notables, including several officials appointed by the Pakistani government, were meeting in the bus depot at the town of Datta Khel in North Waziristan when a missile, presaged only by a brief hissing noise, slammed in their midst, killing at least 40 people, of whom four may have been low level members of the Taliban. An October 6, 2006 strike on a religious school in Bajaur killed over 80 people, including 69 children.

The authors note that not only do we not know the precise figure, even close neighbors of a targeted compound may not know. In this extremely conservative society, the number, let alone the names, of females living in a compound may be unknown to outsiders. Given that the missiles explode at temperatures high enough to utterly dismember or even vaporise bodies, it is often literally impossible to count the dead.

Far more disturbing even than the casualty figures is the portrait presented in the report of an entire society traumatized by the strikes. Interviews with over a hundred inhabitants of the kill zone — not easily conducted, given the Pakistan government’s policy of barring access to all outsiders — reveal many exhibiting classic symptoms of PTSD. The pervasive fear among Waziris that anyone can be a target at any time gives the lie to notions that only confirmed terrorists are targeted — if that were so, innocents would know they are safe and move freely accordingly. Instead they are all condemned to live in what a rare American observer, former hostage journalist David Rhode, described as “hell on earth.” Overall, thanks to U.S. drones, Waziris have been reduced to as bleak a social existence as even the most fanatical Taliban could desire.

Children and adults wake screaming in the night, others are reduced to a state of debilitating listlessness. Group meetings to settle disputes — Jirgas — have traditionally served as a social lubricant in Waziristan. No longer, since people know that any gathering beyond two people might draw the attention of the targeteers. The dead, even when there enough recognizable body parts to collect, must be buried without benefit of a proper funeral. Drivers necessary to transport people and goods are reluctant to take to the roads. Since schools have been targets in the past, few children are being educated. Wedding parties and other social gatherings have become too dangerous to celebrate. The death of so many adult male breadwinners has reduced many families to total destitution.

Furthermore, a widespread belief that the missiles home in on “chips”planted by informants in US pay, who therefore have the power to settle a domestic dispute, has led to mutual mistrust throughout the community. Those wounded in a strike can linger for hours for rescue thanks to the cruel “Double Tap” tactic of launching a second strike at first responders. At least one professional humanitarian relief organization now waits at least six hours before approaching a stricken site.

It seems unconscionable that our government should deny us access to any and all official information regarding this war being waged on our name. Not that such attitudes are new. In the early 1970s, Richard Nixon authorized the bombing of Cambodia and decreed that it be kept utterly secret. Back then, this was considered a serious matter, and so the secret bombing ultimately generated Article Five in the initial articles of impeachment drawn up against Nixon.

Obama might want to think about that.

Andrew Cockburn is the author of Duel: the Strangest Story of the Afghan War, available in Kindle format.. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, published by AK Press, now also available in Kindle edition. He can be reached at amcockburn@gmail.com.

 

[Rafael]

Americans along with our government and establishment are to be blamed for completely destroying the lives of millions of tribals. As they say, this gun powder treason of our own shall never be forgotten!

 

[VCheng]

Americans along with our government and establishment are to be blamed for completely destroying the lives of millions of tribals. As they say, this gun powder treason of our own shall never be forgotten!

It is right for people of both countries to ask their own governments for answers. That is the best way to improve the situation.

 

[SQ8]

It is right for people of both countries to ask their own governments for answers. That is the best way to improve the situation.

You know the punishment for Blasphemy is death...

 

[fatman17]

Thursday, September 27, 2012


US believes it has Pakistan’s ‘tacit consent’ for drone strikes: WSJ

Daily Times Monitor


LAHORE: About once a month, the Central Intelligence Agency sends a fax to a general at Pakistan’s intelligence service outlining broad areas where the US intends to conduct strikes with drone aircraft, the Wall Street Journal quoted US officials as saying.

The Pakistanis, who in public oppose the programme, don’t respond.

On this basis, plus the fact that Pakistan continues to clear airspace in the targeted areas, the US government concludes it has tacit consent to conduct strikes within the borders of a sovereign nation, according to officials familiar with the programme.

Representatives of the White House’s National Security Council and CIA declined to discuss Pakistani consent, saying such information was classified. In public speeches, Obama administration officials have portrayed the US’s use of drones to kill wanted terrorists around the world as being on firm legal ground. In those speeches, officials stopped short of directly discussing the CIA’s drone programme in Pakistan because the operations are covert.

Now, the rationale used by the administration, interpreting Pakistan’s acquiescence as a green light, has set off alarms among some administration legal officials. In particular, lawyers at the US State Department, including top legal adviser Harold Koh, believe this rationale veers near the edge of what can be considered permission, though they still think the programme is legal, officials say.

Two senior administration officials described the approach as interpreting Pakistan’s silence as a “yes”. One dubbed the US approach “cowboy behaviour”.

In a reflection of the programme’s long-term legal uncertainty and precedent-setting nature, a group of lawyers in the administration known as “the council of counsels” is trying to develop a more sustainable framework for how governments should use such weapons.

In public, Pakistan has repeatedly expressed opposition to the drone program, and about 10 months ago closed the CIA’s only drone base in the country. In private, some Pakistani officials say they don’t consider their actions equivalent to providing consent. They say Pakistan has considered shooting down a drone to reassert control over the country’s airspace but shelved the idea as needlessly provocative. Pakistan also has considered challenging the legality of the programme at the United Nations.

“No country and no people have suffered more in the epic struggle against terrorism than Pakistan,” President Asif Ali Zardari told the UN General Assembly on Tuesday. “Drone strikes and civilian casualties on our territory add to the complexity of our battle for hearts and minds through this epic struggle.”

A former Pakistani official who remains close to the programme said Pakistan believes the CIA continues to send notifications for the sole purpose of giving it legal cover.

It is possible Pakistan is playing both sides. Ashley Deeks, a former US State Department assistant legal adviser under Koh who is now at the University of Virginia, said a lack of a Pakistani response to US notifications might be a way for Pakistan to meet seemingly contradictory goals — letting the CIA continue using its airspace but also distancing the government of Pakistan from the programme, which is deeply unpopular among Pakistanis.

Legal experts say US law gives the government broad latitude to pursue al Qaeda and its affiliates wherever they may be. A joint resolution of Congress after the September 11, 2001, attacks authorised the president to use force against the planners of the attacks and those who harbour them. Then president George Bush that month signed a classified order known as a “finding” authorising covert action against al Qaeda.

In an April speech, White House Counterterrorism Adviser John Brennan said the administration has concluded there is nothing in international law barring the US from using lethal force against a threat to the US, despite the absence of a declared war, provided the country involved consents or is unable or unwilling to take action against the threat.

Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said the US drone approach in Pakistan is getting closer to the edge. “It doesn’t mean it is illegal, but you are at the margins of what can reasonably be construed as consent,” he said.

 

[fatman17]

U.S. Drone Strikes


•According to a report by the Wall Street Journal, the CIA faxes Pakistan’s ISI every month outlining areas where they plan on using drone strikes. The ISI returns the message, yet stops short of endorsing the plan. The Obama Administration has taken this lack of reply combined with the continued clearing of air space as consent for their drone program in Pakistan. After the bin Laden raid, the ISI stopped sending messages back. Many officials are now concerned with the continued legality of the strikes. Since General David Patraeus has become head of the CIA, he has reportedly become more cautious with drone strikes in Pakistan. He has been known to overrule strikes “that could create friction with Pakistan.”[v]

•According to a Pakistani security official’s confirmation on Tuesday, a Turkish Al Qaeda operative, Seleh al Turki and an Iraqi liaison of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, Abu Akash al Iraqi were two of the five killed in Monday’s drone strike. Seleh al Turki was a “midlevel” al Qaeda operative, and Abu Akash al Iraqi was an important link between al Qaeda and the Taliban who has been a target of counterterrorism agencies for a long time.[vi]

CTB

 

[fatman17]

Weekend Edition October 19-21, 2012

Murder and Trauma in Our Name


America’s Drone Terrorism

by SHELDON RICHMAN


In the United States, the dominant narrative about the use of drones in Pakistan is of a surgically precise and effective tool that makes the U.S. safer by enabling “targeted killing” of terrorists, with minimal downsides or collateral impacts.

This narrative is false.

Those are the understated opening words of a disturbing, though unsurprising, nine-month study of the Obama administration’s official, yet unacknowledged, remote-controlled bombing campaign in the North Waziristan region of Pakistan, near Afghanistan. The report, “Living Under Drones,” is a joint effort by the New York University School of Law’s Global Justice Clinic and Stanford Law School’s International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic.

The NYU/Stanford report goes beyond reporting estimates of the civilian casualties inflicted by the deadly and illegal U.S. campaign. It also documents the hell the Pakistanis endure under President Barack Obama’s policy, which includes a “kill list” from which he personally selects targets. That hell shouldn’t be hard to imagine. Picture yourself living in an area routinely visited from the air by pilotless aircraft carrying Hellfire missiles. This policy is hardly calculated to win friends for the United States.

Defenders of the U.S. campaign say that militants in Pakistan threaten American troops in Afghanistan as well as Pakistani civilians. Of course, there is an easy way to protect American troops: bring them home. The 11-year-long Afghan war holds no benefits whatever for the security of the American people. On the contrary, it endangers Americans by creating hostility and promoting recruitment for anti-American groups.

The official U.S. line is that America’s invasion of Afghanistan was intended to eradicate al-Qaeda and the Taliban, who harbored them. Yet the practical effect of the invasion and related policies, including the invasion of Iraq and the bombing in Yemen and Somalia, has been to facilitate the spread of al-Qaeda and like-minded groups.

U.S. policy is a textbook case of precisely how to magnify the very threat that supposedly motivated the policy. The Obama administration now warns of threats from Libya — where the U.S. consulate was attacked and the ambassador killed — and Syria. Thanks to U.S. policy, al-Qaeda in Afghanistan spawned al-Qaeda in Iraq, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.

If that’s success, what would failure look like?

Regarding Pakistani civilians, the report states,

While civilian casualties are rarely acknowledged by the U.S. government, there is significant evidence that U.S. drone strikes have injured and killed civilians.… It is difficult to obtain data on strike casualties because of U.S. efforts to shield the drone program from democratic accountability, compounded by the obstacles to independent investigation of strikes in North Waziristan. The best currently available public aggregate data on drone strikes are provided by The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ), an independent journalist organization. TBIJ reports that from June 2004 through mid-September 2012, available data indicate that drone strikes killed 2,562–3,325 people in Pakistan, of whom 474–881 were civilians, including 176 children. TBIJ reports that these strikes also injured an additional 1,228–1,362 individuals.

The Obama administration denies that it has killed civilians, but bear in mind that it considers any male of military age a “militant.” This is not to be taken seriously.

The report goes on,

U.S. drone strike policies cause considerable and under-accounted-for harm to the daily lives of ordinary civilians, beyond death and physical injury. Drones hover twenty-four hours a day over communities in northwest Pakistan, striking homes, vehicles, and public spaces without warning. Their presence terrorizes men, women, and children, giving rise to anxiety and psychological trauma among civilian communities. Those living under drones have to face the constant worry that a deadly strike may be fired at any moment, and the knowledge that they are powerless to protect themselves.

It’s even worse than it sounds:

The U.S. practice of striking one area multiple times, and evidence that it has killed rescuers, makes both community members and humanitarian workers afraid or unwilling to assist injured victims. Some community members shy away from gathering in groups.

How can Americans tolerate this murder and trauma committed in their name? But don’t expect a discussion of this in Monday night’s foreign-policy debate. Mitt Romney endorses America’s drone terrorism.

Sheldon Richman is senior fellow at The Future of Freedom Foundation (where this essay originally appeared) in Fairfax, Va., and author of Tethered Citizens: Time to Repeal the Welfare State. Visit his blog “Free Association” at Free Association. Send him email.

 

[miss]

Drones are necessary instruments in the WOT. The terrorists are really sscared of being hit by these birds and I am glad they are being used in Pakistan to destroy taliabnis.

 

[fatman17]

Drone Permission

•Appearing before the Senate Standing Committee on Defense on Monday, retired Defense Secretary Yasin Malik revealed that the U.S. “was given the use of Shamsi air base by the UAE for drone attacks with the approval of Pakistan.”

CTOrg

“Use of Shamsi for drone attacks had Pak approval: Defence Secretary,” Geo, October 22, 2012. Available at http://www.geo.tv/GeoDetail.aspx?ID=72521

 

[kalu_miah]

If I may poke my nose a little:

USA is allergic to Islamic extremists and considers them as pests. Where ever they pop up on the surface of the globe, the response will be whack a mole:
Whac-a-mole - YouTube

Since these Islamic extremists are no good for anybody, it is better to reeducate them and change their mindset, those that cannot be changed, there should be no mercy for them.

But first one has to define who is an extremist and who is not, that is the central question.

 

[fatman17]

Weekend Edition Nov 30-Dec 02, 2012

Kill Lists and the Constitution

Reining in Obama and His Drones

by RALPH NADER


Barack Obama, former president of the Harvard Law Review and a constitutional law lecturer, should go back and review his coursework. He seems to have declined to comport his presidency to the rule of law.

Let’s focus here on his major expansion of drone warfare in defiance of international law, statutory law and the Constitution. Obama’s drones roam over multiple nations of Asia and Africa and target suspects, both known and unknown, whom the president, in his unbridled discretion, wants to evaporate for the cause of national security.

More than 2,500 people have been killed by Obama’s drones, many of them civilians and bystanders, including American citizens, irrespective of the absence of any “imminent threat” to the United States.

As Justin Elliott of ProPublica wrote: “Under Obama…only 13 percent (of those killed) could be considered militant leaders – either of the Pakistani Taliban, the Afghan Taliban, or Al Qaeda.” The remaining fatalities, apart from many innocent civilians, including children, were people oppressed by their own harsh regimes or dominated by U.S. occupation of their country. Aside from human rights and the laws of war, this distinction between civilian and combatant matters because it shows that Obama’s drones are becoming what Elliott calls “a counterinsurgency air force” for our collaborative regimes.

The “kill lists” are the work of Obama and his advisors, led by John O. Brennan, and come straight from the White House, according to The New York Times. Apparently, the president spends a good deal of time being prosecutor, judge, jury, executioner and concealer. But he does so quietly; this is no dramatic “thumbs-down” emperor.

Mr. Brennan spoke at Harvard Law School about a year ago and told a remarkably blasé audience that what he and the president were doing was perfectly legal under the law of self-defense. Self-defense that is defined, of course, by the president.

It appears from recent statements on The Daily Show that President Obama does not share the certitude boldly displayed by Mr. Brennan. On October 18, President Obama told John Stewart, and his audience, that “one of the things we’ve got to do is put a legal architecture in place, and we need Congressional help in order to do that, to make sure that not only am I reined in but any president is reined in terms of some of the decisions that we’re making.”

So in the absence of “a legal architecture” of accountability, do presidents knock off whomever they want to target (along with bystanders or family members), whether or not the targeted person is actually plotting an attack against the United States? It seems that way, in spite of what is already in place legally, called the Constitution, separation of powers and due process of law. What more legal architecture does Mr. Obama need?

Obviously what he wants is a self-contained, permanent “Office of Presidential Predator Drone Assassinations” in the White House, to use, author, scholar and litigator Bruce Fein’s nomenclature. According to The New York Times, President Obama wants “ explicit rules for targeted killing…. So that a new president would inherit clear standards and procedures.” Mr. Fein notes that “clear standards and procedures without accountability to the judiciary, Congress, or the American people” undermine the rule of law and our democracy.

Indeed, the whole deliberation process inside the Obama administration has been kept secret, a continuing process of morbid over-classification that even today contains secret internal legal opinions on targeted killings. The government refuses even to acknowledge that a drone air force operates over Pakistan – a fact that everybody knows including the hundreds of injured and displaced Pakistanis. This drone air force uses, what The New York Times called , “signature strikes” “against groups of suspected, unknown militants.”

Predictably, these strikes are constantly terrorizing thousands of families who fear a strike anytime day or night, and are causing a blowback that is expanding the number of Al Qaeda sympathizers and affiliates from Pakistan to Yemen. “Signature strikes,” according to the Times, “have prompted the greatest conflict inside the Obama administration.” Former CIA director under George W. Bush, Michael V. Hayden has publically questioned whether the expansion in the use of drones is counterproductive and creating more enemies and the desire for more revenge against the U.S.

Critics point out how many times in the past that departments and agencies have put forth misleading or false intelligence, from the Vietnam War to the arguments for invading Iraq, or have missed what they should have predicted such as the fall of the Soviet Union. This legacy of errors and duplicity should restrain presidents who execute, by ordering drone operators to push buttons that target people thousands of miles away, based on secret, so-called intelligence.

Mr. Obama wants, in Mr. Fein’s view, to have “his secret and unaccountable predator drone assassinations to become permanent fixtures of the nation’s national security complex.” Were Obama to remember his constitutional law, such actions would have to be constitutionally authorized by Congress and subject to judicial review.

With his Attorney General Eric Holder maintaining that there is sufficient due process entirely inside the Executive Branch and without Congressional oversight or judicial review, don’t bet on anything more than a more secret, violent, imperial presidency that shreds the Constitution’s separation of powers and checks and balances.

And don’t bet that other countries of similar invasive bent won’t remember this green-light on illegal unilateralism when they catch up with our drone capabilities.

Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer and author of Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, published by AK Press. Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition.

 

[fatman17]

Losing Pakistan: An Insider’s Look at How the U.S. Deals With Its Ally

By Omar Waraich

April 14, 20130

@TimeWorld


One evening in June 2009, Richard Holbrooke paid a visit to Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari at the presidential palace in Islamabad. It was one of his first visits to the region as the Obama Administration’s special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan. In that role, Holbrooke — who died in December 2010 — wanted to broaden and deepen engagement with the country many had come to see as the most dangerous place in the world. And Zardari had his own ideas about how Washington could help.

“Pakistan is like AIG,” Zardari told Holbrooke, comparing his country to the U.S. insurance giant that was bailed out in 2008. “Too big to fail.” Washington, Zardari keenly recalled, had given AIG “$100 billion. You should give Pakistan the same,” Zardari said. Holbrooke smiled throughout the meeting.


Sitting with Holbrooke was Vali Nasr, then his senior adviser. Nasr recalls the episode in his new book, The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat, a searing critique of how the Obama Administration has been too timid to transform American foreign policy. Holbrooke, writes Nasr, was troubled by Zardari’s display of dependence on the U.S. and the sense of entitlement that went with it. “Holbrooke didn’t like the image of Pakistan holding a gun to its own head as it shook down America for aid,” writes Nasr, now dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

Holbrooke did agree, however, with Zardari that Pakistan was important and the U.S. had a long-term interest in its stability. For the next year and a half, Holbrooke and his team pursued a policy of diplomatic engagement with Pakistan. It went beyond the traditional approach narrowly based on security concerns. The idea was to try and address Pakistan’s strategic calculus — an ambitious target that may have underestimated how far Pakistan was willing to go without changing its ways. “What Holbrooke wanted,” Nasr tells TIME in an interview, “was to engage big and try and change the course of this country and its relationship with Washington once and for all.”

But from the very start, President Barack Obama and the White House never really bought into the idea. “The White House tolerated Holbrooke’s approach for a while,” Nasr writes in the book, “but in the end decided that a policy of coercion and confrontation would better achieve our goals in Pakistan.” Washington was less interested in working with Pakistan, Nasr says, than pressuring it into compliance. That strategy, he says, has failed. And now, he warns, the U.S. risks pivoting away from the region at the cost of abandoning vital interests that remain there.

“When you look at Pakistan today,” says Nasr, “it is nuclear-armed, in near conflict with India, has a dangerous civil war with its own extremists, is now subject to one of the most brutal terrorism campaigns against its population, that is now coming apart along sectarian lines.” If the U.S. does not maintain influence in Pakistan, he says, it won’t be able to have a positive impact on the direction of the country. “Looking at it from an American perspective,” Nasr says, “we’re just going to be basically saying, ‘We’re going to sit on the sideline and look at this roller coaster go off this rail.’”


Holbrooke’s approach was ambitious. A strategic dialogue was established between the two countries. Nonmilitary aid was tripled. Washington began to reach out to civilian centers in Pakistan for the first time. “There was a discussion on energy and electricity and water and women,” says Nasr. “These were ways of laying out for Pakistan a longer road map with the U.S., and alternately trying to put on the table for Pakistan interests that would gradually wean it away from its strategic outlook and bring it in a new direction.” There would be no quick fix. It was a longer strategy aimed at slowly undoing decades of alienation and mistrust.

In the first two years, Nasr insists that there were rewards. The U.S. got more intelligence cooperation, he details in the book. “More agents, more listening posts, and even visas for the deep-cover CIA operatives who found [Osama] bin Laden.” Long-strained relations between Islamabad and Kabul improved enough for it to help U.S. counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan. The Pakistanis also finally moved against the Pakistani Taliban in the Swat Valley and South Waziristan, in military offensives that helped the war across the border. “The Pakistanis didn’t cooperate 100%,” says Nasr. “But they did cooperate 50%.”

But the Obama Administration didn’t have the patience to stick with it. As Nasr acknowledges, there was a rival school of thought that said, “It was too difficult, too time-consuming and wouldn’t work anyway.” When Holbrooke died, their view won out. Nasr resigned from the State Department soon after. In 2011, three major incidents brought the relationship crashing to its lowest-point ever: a CIA contractor, Raymond Davis, allegedly killed two people in Lahore; U.S. Navy Seals carried out a raid to get Osama bin Laden without informing the Pakistanis; and toward the end of the year, 26 Pakistani troops were killed in a cross-border incident.

The security relationship, Nasr says, worked better when there were other efforts alongside it. “The Pakistanis said, ‘O.K., you have security interests. We have economic interests and we have civilian interests,’” recalls Nasr. “We always got much further with the Pakistanis in those first two years when the conversation was not just about drones and terrorists, but it was also about energy and water.”

The CIA and the Pentagon saw the benefits of the cooperation, Nasr notes in his book. But at the same time, he writes, they applied constant pressure that “threatened to break up the relationship.” At one point, Holbrooke turned to him, shaking his head, and said: “Watch them [the CIA] ruin this relationship. And when it is ruined, they are going to say, ‘We told you, You can’t work with Pakistan!’ We never learn.”

Read more: In Book, Holbrooke's Ex-Adviser Reveals How U.S. Deals With Pakistan | TIME.com

 

[fatman17]

Weekend Edition May 3-5, 2013

Welcome to the Age of Murder.Gov

The Game of Drones

by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR


At last we know. The mysterious legal authority for Barack Obama’s killer drone program flows from another administration with an elastic interpretation of executive power: that of Richard Nixon.

In a chilling 16-page dossier known simply as the White Paper, one of Obama’s statutory brains at the Justice Department cites the 1969 secret bombing of Cambodia as a legal rationale justifying drone strikes, deep inside nations, against which the United States is not officially at war.

This startling disclosure is drafted in the antiseptic prose of an insurance adjuster announcing the denial of a claim based on a pre-existing condition. Yet, the bombing of Cambodia (aka Operation Menu), which involved more than 3,000 air strikes, was almost universally acknowledged as a war crime. Now the Obama administration has officially enshrined that atrocity as precedent for its own killing rampages.

Since Obama’s election, the CIA has overseen nearly 320 drone strikes in Pakistan alone, killing more than 3,000 people, as many as 900 of them civilians. Among the dead are at least 176 children. Assassination was never this easy, never so risk-free.

George W. Bush was mocked by liberals for calling himself the Decider. Bush deployed this pathetic bit of oil slang to defend himself against accusations that Cheney and his coterie of Neo-Cons were calling the shots in the Iraq war. But was Bush’s posturing any more absurd than the image of Obama piously consulting the homilies of Aquinas, as he personally checks off the names on his drone kill list and watches streaming videos of the writhing bodies shredded by Hellfire missiles?

Bush’s murderous psyche at least presented presented itself for analysis and explication. Perhaps W’s blood lust stemmed from a Freudian fixation on Saddam’s pathetic attempt to off his father in Kuwait City. Perhaps it was warped by spasms of subconscious guilt over allowing 9/11 to occur on his watch. What, however, is the driving force behind Obama’s savagery? Unlike Bush, who tended to show revealing glimpses of emotional strain, Obama operates with the icy rectitude of a political sociopath.

In Obama’s game of drones, the atrocities in the name of empire seem consciously geared to some deep political algorithm of power and death.

The Left remains largely insensate to the moral and constitutional transgressions being committed by their champion, leaving only the faintly ludicrous figure of Rand Paul to offer official denunciations against these malignant operations. For his troubles, Paul’s admirable filibuster against the nomination of John Brennan, master of the drones, to head the CIA is ridiculed as an exercise in paranoia by the likes of Frank Rich and Lawrence O’Donnell.

The professional Left, from the progressive caucus to the robotic minions of Moveon.org, lodge no objections and launch no protests over the administration’s acts of sanctimonious violence against the empire’s enemies.

Worse, they behave like political eunuchs, offering groveling tributes and degrading supplications to their Master, even as Obama defiles their ideological aspirations.

The president has offered us a master class in political mesmerism, transforming the anti-war Left into supine functionaries of the imperial management team.

The cyber-Left is kept rigidly in line by the architects of liberal opinion. From David Corn to Rachel Maddow, the progressive press acts in sinister harmony with the administration’s neoliberal agenda. They seduously ignore Obama’s constitutional depredations, and instead devote acres of airspace to the faux clashes over sequestration and gay marriage.

Night after night, we are presented with sideshows, what Hitchcock called the McGuffin in his films, the dramatic diversions designed to distract the audience’s attention from the real game being played. Meanwhile, the liberal commentariat is balefully complacent to the rapacity of Obama’s remote control death squadrons, even in the face of somber evidence regarding the drone program’s criminal nature. Raid after raid, kill after kill, ruin after ruin, they remain silent. But their silence only serves to emphasize their complicity, their consciousness of guilt. Their fingers too are stained by distant blood.

Even Nixon, the ultimate enforcer, was rocked by insubordinates defecting from his regime, aides and staffers who reached their limit and resigned in disgust. One of them was Roger Morris. Morris, an occasional contributor to CounterPunch, served on the National Security Council during LBJ’s administration and continued after Nixon’s election under Henry Kissinger. But Morris reached his limit in the spring of 1970, resigning over the covert bombing of Cambodia. How times have changed.

Where are similar figures of conscience in the Obama White House, or even the Democratic Party? Where are the leaks and resignations? Perhaps this is the ultimate object lesson on display in the ongoing persecution of Bradley Manning. Internal dissent, regardless of its legal and moral standing, shall not be tolerated. Indeed, it will be considered sedition and will be smothered by the supreme sanction of the government.

Acts that were once considered outrages against conscience are now routine.

Welcome to the age of Murder.Gov.

Jeffrey St. Clair is the editor of CounterPunch. His most recent book (with Joshua Frank) is Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).

 

[Hawaii's Finest]

I don't understand Obama is a Muslim. Why do hate him so much?