AP IMPACT: study suggests drones kill far fewer civilians than many Pakistanis believe

[limpyhobbler]

73. That is what they want. That's what they say and I believe them.

If they wanted to violently spread religion----then why weren't they doing it in 1950?

My understanding is that they didn't really exist yet in the 1950s. It was a totally different world at that time with different issues and a different generation of humans were alive on earth.

How could anyone possibly take over a country if they aren't strong enough to employ any tactic other than terrorism, other than by the sponsorship of an imperial power such as the US?

They are infiltrated into the police, army, and intelligence service.

BTW, terrorists have been in charge of Saudi Arabia since the 30s, when the Wahabists did a deal with the US and Britain. That's where the 9/11 hijackers came from, remember? The elites give the terrorists pretty much free reign over the general population to preserve their own privileges in exchange for our domination of their oil fields.

I don't dispute that.

The way to fight terrorists is to quit trying to dominate their countries. They would instantly lose any appeal they have now to the general populace in those places.

We are not trying to dominate Pakistan or Afghanistan. Actually I think we would love to leave. We went there to disrupt terrorist groups and that is what we have been successfully doing. That's what President Obama promised to do when he was running to office, and we all voted for it. I'm glad to see he is keeping his promise.

BTW, the answer to the 1950 question is that ME nationalism in that era was strictly secular.

I think you are confusing the terrorist groups for nationalists. We are not combating nationalist groups in Pakistan. We are combating fascists political-extremist-militant-religious-fundamentalist-terrorists.

The US and Britain overthrew the secular democrat Mossadegh in Iran for the crime of wanting to use his country's resources to benefit their own population. In that process, we specifically funded and encouraged the fundie whackjobs (who later supported Khomeini) to oppose secular democracy. Israel, for the same reasons, funded Hamas as an alternative to the secular PLO. The US and Pakistan established and funded the religious extremists in Afghanistan in the 80s.

I don't have a hard time believing any of that. We played a major role in creating the extremists. Particularly in Afghanistan and Pakistan we funded them to fight the Soviets in the 80s and then we abandoned those countries in the 90s and let the extremists take over. That was not cool. Why keep abandoning, when abandoning already failed? Since we helped create those groups, do we have any responsibility to help clean up the mess? I think one could also draw an analogy and say the US and Britain played a role in causing the rise of Hitler and the Nazis after World War I, because of the harsh sanctions imposed on Germany following that war. And during the years of Nazi ascendance there were a lot of people who felt bad for them and thought all they wanted was to be left alone and free of western oppression. But if one would have listened to what the Nazis were saying, considered their stated aims, they could have been stopped sooner.

Also yes there is quite a bit of history there and I'm glad we seem to agree on the relevant historical facts but just disagree about current best policies.

Also you drew some parallels between our relations with various countries (Iran, Palestinians), to help to see the big picture. And I agree that is an ugly picture. But once we figure out that we are guilty of all these things, once we see that bigger picture, we don't necessarily have to let that take away our ability to make more narrow distinctions when developing policies toward various countries or provinces. I don't see any reason why we can't have one policy in Morocco, a different one in Libya, a third in Tunisia, for example. The situation is highly nuanced and dependent upon human facts on the ground.

Stop fucking with those countries and promoting religious nuts to fight secular nationalists, and the terrorism stops.

I don't think those extremist groups are going to stop spreading their shit until they are met with force. I don't think we can fight them with the power of love. They don't respond to that.

Our involvement with Pakistan should be limited to keeping their nuclear stockpike out of the hands of nutcases.

Pakistan is a semi-failed state. If the Pakistan government falls to religious extremists we won't be able to keep it out of their hands. And there is every reason to believe they will use it.

Easy enough to do through regular security procedures--no war necessary.

If the gov't there falls, we won't have anybody with whom to coordinate procedures, and there could (probably will) be a much bigger, nastier war.