Now imagine “U.S. drone strike kills 30 pine nut farm workers in France” and feel the difference (which is non-existent). Then it goes on tv and reads the list of this morning’s evil men who must be stopped.
We already know that the current US administration and senate majority does not care about the lives of their own citizens either. Mass shootings, police brutality, the stoking of hate crimes and the absence of a modern social safety net, withholding support to domestic climate refugees, inadequate industrial regulation, are directly killing many US citizens right now. Those deaths could be prevented but our government willingly chooses not to.
The normalizing of imperialistic murder abroad is not an anomaly; it is a core part of US identity. The US itself is a product of imperialistic murder, its crowning achievement even.
To this day US soldiers deployed abroad use the term “indian country” to designate occupied territory where they conduct counter-insurgency operations. That term dates back to counter-insurgency operations conducted by the very same institution against Native Americans until 100 years ago. What was once abroad is now domestic - such is the nature of empire.
Because freedom and democracy. Wars of attrition for political purposes are nothing but state sponsored terror by another name. More than 16,000 dead and 30,000 injured. Talk about Afghan 9/11 ever year for the past 10 years probably 20 to 40 on which way you are counting. Who destabilized the country? Was it the Soviets or was it the Americans?
Both, what you mean is who keeps it instabil. But that's also not as simple as just looking at US drone strikes. Though they are a non small reason due to the mental trauma they caused in a lot of people in some regions, which IMHO is likely to caused more people to radicalize.
I think you’re conflating morally worse with practically worse. It’s not propaganda to note that certain countries attacking each other spell out graver consequences
That fact that you distinguish between morally worse and "practically worse" make me thing you are already under the influence of the propaganda.
But it does not mean you are right: Afganistan cannot attack the US over 30 dead civillians, the US can attack Iran for some Saudi property destruction by Yemenis who are being raped by Saudi using US weaponery on them.
Yeah? And why is that? Is it that certain countries' farm workers' lives are worth more than certain others? It sounds to me that the propaganda got you too.
... no, they’re worth the same. Hence morally vs practically. The difference is that killing some third world farmers doesn’t cause a war between first world powers.
Alternatively if Yemen rebels attack Saudi Arabia, that’s bad. If Iran does it, everybody in a thousand mile radius starts sweating.
> Alternatively if Yemen rebels attack Saudi Arabia, that’s bad.
Why is it bad? I mean, after they've been at the receiving end of Saud's war machine, why can they not retaliate? They sure did not cause as much boodshed (zero, just material damage) as the Sauds have caused them.
I get that you have a gripe with Saudi geo politics. And it’s probably one I agree with, but I’m really just trying to say that blowing random innocents can vary in the severity of repercussions and that you’re not “falling for propaganda” or following racist ideas if you acknowledge this- and that moral and practical concerns are separate things.
> that moral and practical concerns are separate things.
I agree. This separation I find problematic. How often we hear "I want to be vegan (for the animals = moral) but I cannot give up cheese/meat/etc (too convenient/tasty = practical)"
To me they are not separate. Oppression is oppression, I hate it regardless who does it or how inconvenient it is to stop it.
Maybe not the right time and place to being this up, but I personally believe that such illegal activities conducted by the U.S. is hurting people of other nations who is fighting for their own democracy.
Just imagine China start to playing news such like this in those concentration camps, free golden material for showing people how rightful it is to follow the lead of CCP I'd say.
While it is true the U.S. is benefiting from it's strong global influence, but it is also true that nobody wants to be threatened. If the U.S. don't want to be the good guy in this game, at least don't be the bad one.
So do you care about the civilians, or not? It seems possible US engagement saves more civilians than it kills. At least that is presumably the general idea.
Unlikely. There were massacres during the Taliban rule outside of war, but it was at much lower scale than in the current war, and US only helps taliban grow by its intervention, it seems, if you look at the numbers of fighters.
It's not like killing a person with certain beliefs stops the beliefs from spreading.
The idea was that "possible US engagement saves more civilians than it kills", and I was reacting to that, as it is very doubtful.
I didn't say it would be ok to live under Taliban. But there are other weird islamic countries, where I wouldn't want to live either. Do you propose US making war there, too?
The US is in afghan for one reason only, opioids. It's no coincidence that US opioid addiction rates skyrocketed in the years following the Afghan invasion. The big pharma companies benefit from the US controlling the worlds major poppy fields, and in turn they pushed their product unto the masses.
I'm sorry but your explanation makes no sense.
Oil is wherever it is located, so you have to go there if you want to take it or protect it. But you can grow poppies in most places. It makes no sense for the US to spend something like a trillion dollars and thousands of lives for something they could grow in California or Texas.
The Taliban were a tiny splinter group before the US financed and trained them. They have always been fanatics. Funny how they were not called terrorists while the US thought they could use them for their own ends.
There is a historical reason for everything. Who attacked US in the first place? It is not even reachable from countries they ‘democratized’, except for caribbean guys.
Afghanistan does not harbor 9/11 terrorists. The 9/11 terrorists were all from Saudi Arabia, they did not learn how to fly in a cave in the Afghan mountains and their funding did not come from a financial center in Kandahar; Bin Laden was found hiding in Pakistan.
That war is absurd and should have stopped a long time ago. It's just fueling more terrorism. All western countries should leave the middle east, for good, forever (except maybe the odd ship to secure shipping lanes and stuff like that, but you get my point).
Yo, u are aware Afghanistan and Taliban two different things, right? Afghanistan didn’t harbor 911 terrorist, Taliban did. Afghanistan doesn’t carry out car bombing, Taliban do. Now while those afghan pine workers do share land with some of the worst scums on earth, they are not anymore guilty for Taliban's action than some random french farmers.
I’m pretty sure there aren’t people in France trying to establish a violent worldwide theocracy, and even if there were, the French government would have a handle on it/not be complicit.
We don’t conduct missions in Afghanistan for funsies. We do it because there is no State we can lean on to stamp down on the extremists.
Extremists in Bangladesh are locally organized, capable of coordinated attacks, and part of an international movement. Extremists in the US are neither of those things. Often, Incidents in the US are chalked up to “white national extremists” based on nothing more than some murdered having searched such websites. There used to be an organized extremist threat in the US back when the KKK was active, but that was crushed. What’s left is remnants. That’s not true in Bangladesh. Extremists systematically killed journalists a few years ago. Before it was banned, the Islamist party got 3 million votes in national elections. Extremism is being bankrolled from foreign countries through schools that teach such views. There is a deep well of support for such views among the people—1/3 of Bangladeshis believe that people who leave Islam should be executed. And, finally, there is a real risk of extremists taking over the State, as happened with Pakistan and Afghanistan.
None of that is true in the US. People who say “hurr durr but Republicans are a white nationalist party” do so out of ignorance, because they have no idea what it’s like to have extremists actually threaten your democracy. And their ignorance is dangerous. It’s dangerous to a world that needs US leadership to overcome extremism. Their false equivalency and apologism undermines the people in countries like Bangladesh who continue to fight for liberal democracy and the rule of law.
1. So the CIA can smuggle heroin to big pharma, and fund black projects. (largely unsubstantiated position)
2. To occupy overland energy routes, disrupting the ability of China to build infrastructure linking to Iran. The whole One Belt/One Road thing is intended to construct an alternative to China's very vulnerable maritime lines of communication, reducing the risk of a resource import blockade by the US Navy. They can't get a oil or gas pipeline from Iran if the A-stan government is in the back pocket of the US, and US military bases sit astride the route.
3. To present the risk of a 2nd front (1st front = Iraq, Persian Gulf), boxing in Iran. Not a major jump-off point for a land invasion (due to logistical constraints) but could serve as basing for aviation assets and special operations raids into the parts of Iran on the eastern side of the Zagros Mountains.
Personally, I don't think any of those reasons is valid for staying there.
>>>What’s the threat, again? I forgot.
Basically we've spent decades playing whack-a-mole, attacking symptoms instead of root causes. And one of those root causes is....our mole-whacking kills far too many innocent civilians.
This is deeply tragic. I wish the story gave more details. Based on the provincial governor's statement, it sounds like U.S. forces were relying on the Afghan government's intelligence assessment.
I also wish news sources would be more careful about suggesting that there are autonomous killer robots in the sky. The drone didn't target anything. A remote pilot did, based on information he/she was provided.
The US can't sustain casualties and maintain any popular support for the war or the reputation of the military, so they use remote control killing machines on people the media don't care about. Unless you have people on the ground (and even then!) you can't really be sure of your intel. This media strategy allows them to not care about the quality of the intel. While the power of the state is still terrifying, it is vastly weaker than during the Vietnam era.
Can someone explain to me how the US military is still unable to distinguish pine nut farmers from IS Jihadi terrorists? Where is all this advanced military tech I keep hearing the US military is developing that people are mistaking for aliens?
Yes, someone can but you'll need security clearance for that.
If we assume this was not intentional, then the two most probable causes are human or technical or any combination of both.
A drone can't land, open Skype and allow an interrogator to speak with the locals in their language- it flies high, have limited visibility and the interpretation of the incoming data is based on prior intelligence.
If you look at the pictures you'll see that pine nut farmers looks the same as IS Jihadi terrorists, both use civilian clothes and sometimes they are actually the same person.
They arrest people who share pesto recipes, or search for pesto on the web. New technology is deployed to detect and suppress the Improvised Pesto Dishes found in roadside cafes, especially the deadly Rocket Pesto.
There are small Caribbean islands where Pestofarians openly consume pasta with pesto. The Colombian Green Pesto Cartel has entered a bloody feud with the Red Pesto Brigades. However, I understand some US states are legalizing pesto now.
This is how you create terrorists.
What do you think the children and friends feelings towards the US will be from now on?
People get radicalized for much less than that.
Their feelings will be affected and rightly so, it is a tradegy. However the feelings of a few people about an error can not be the single parameter to decide if drone strikes are used. War have casualties.
What about the feelings of the children and friends after 9.11, Charlie Hebdo, Bataclan, Nice, Stockholm, Trèbes, Paris, Liège and Strasbourg? I could go on. Of the 24 jihadist attacks in the EU in 2018, 10 occurred in France, four in the United Kingdom, four in the Netherlands, two in Germany and one each in Belgium, Italy, Spain and Sweden. In 2017, a total of 62 people were killed in ten completed jihadist attacks in the European Union, according to Europol figures. The number of attempted jihadist attacks reached 33 in 2017.
If a single drone strike is how you create terrorists, what is being created in Europe?
I think that there is an inherent difference between drone killings and atrocities committed by people.
The drone killings are anonymous, out of the sky, with no idea who the guilty party is besides a nebulous "USA" or "the West"; a vacuum of information besides a robotic, faceless apology in a press release (that is itself just more insult, more humiliation), and the knowledge that a foreign country can reach out and murder people living next door to you without consequence. The humiliation and rage and sense of powerlessness and living every day knowing that they'll do it again and nobody will do anything about it simply festers. These are key ingredients in growing terrorists. This is how you make terrorists. Humilation and anger and a sense of powerlessness and that the perpetrator will face no justice.
When some idiot boy shoots up an office in Paris there's a guilty party, a reckoning with a body (or an arrest), a name, an investigation and professional state employees actively going after someone, actively pursuing justice (very different to the state doing no more than shrugging and saying "yeah, that's the USA for you, they murder you and your neighbours, nothing we can do about it"). There is a qualitative difference; the key ingredients above aren't present. Even if the terrorist gets away, it's recognised that it was an individual(s) and that they are being pursued; someone is seeking justice on your behalf.
If a single drone strike is how you create terrorists, what is being created in Europe?
> Even if the terrorist gets away, it's recognised that it was an individual(s).
That's a tough sell when (large) parts of communities are complicit, hiding, funding, supporting the individuals.
It's my impression that the primary difference is that we expect better from advanced nations and their citizens, not that there's a large difference in behavior. Denmark officially murdering people because of their sexual identity would be a shock. Saudi Arabia doing the same isn't, because we don't see SA anywhere near the level of (cultural, social, civilizational) development of Denmark. A child throwing a temper tantrum is normal, an adult doing the same raises suspicion of delayed development.
That's a tough sell when (large) parts of communities are complicit, hiding, funding, supporting the individuals.
I'm unconvinced; I believe it's not a tough sell. This is based on my observations of to whom people ascribe these crimes. They blame individuals first. Even if they should ascribe more blame to the organisations behind those individuals, those individuals are recognised (rightly or wrongly) as the primary culprits.
When I see news reports of such things, it's individual people that are presented as the culprits. News articles and Wiki articles name the individuals involved. While they do have organisations and groups behind them, if you ask people "who did this" you don't get a nebulous set of organisations; you get a name.
That depends on who those individuals are though. The media reports and reactions do change very much if you exchange some words, like replacing "islamist radical" with "white supremacist" or "christian fundamentalist" and "mosque" with "website".
You will certainly get individual names for each attack, the difference is whether having those names concludes the investigation or not. There are exceptions to this, of course, it's just my general expression.
you put parentheses around the "large" but I'm still gonna pick on this.
For my part, I have yet to hear of a major jihadist attack in the west in which the perpetrators and their supporters were not completely surrounded by police and intelligence personel. In Germany we're watching a parliamentary commission pick apart what happened in the "lone wolf" case where someone drove a truck into a christmas market in Berlin.
"You can't do anything about these things!" people exclaim. They're lone wolves after all. BS. That guy, and his supporters, were in constant contact with embedded sources around their milieu. I'm not a big friend of the police state as it is, and especially of intelligence services. And this story and others like it make it really hard to still believe in incompetence and bad coordination as the sources for all the fuck-ups that lead to him succeeding in the first place, and then the crucial witnesses being conveniently deported days after.
But my real point (sorry for digressing here for a bit) is that even in this in-depth investigation, the number of active supporters was tiny. And they were not even really organized. It was more like "I have a friend here ho will help me out, and one here, and one here." Your statement (even with parentheses) does not reflect how small these "parts" are.
Certainly, intelligence services do play a role, both in pushing actors over the threshold and in hindering investigations. In the case of the Bataclan attacks, the perpetrators fled to Belgium and hid in their local communities. It's also where they recruit, get support from and funnel funding through. Obviously it's not "everybody there is on board", but there is an enabling base and little push back from those opposed to the measures chosen by radicals.
2) False equivalent, if you think the USA should be held to the same standards that we hold the terrorists to then effectively the USA have become terrorists as well.
3) The EU has taken its attacks so far quite well, no other countries were invaded, no mass deportations or murders of muslims or immigrants have happened. Unfortunately this bs has shifted the political climate.
Isn't it a funny coincidence that the invasion of Afghanistan coincided with the sharp increase in opioid addiction across the USA? I think not, and it wouldn't be the first time that the US government has caused drug addiction epidemics in it's own country. Just look at how the CIA caused the crack-cocaine problem in the African American community.
The US allied with the Northern Alliance after invading Afghanistan, and they had no say in whether we invaded or not.
The US asked the Taliban to extradite Osama Bin Laden, they refused, so the US invaded Afghanistan to bring him to justice and dismantle the Taliban.
The US killed Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban is just as powerful today as they were then. The conflict has also killed over 100,000 civilians, and almost the same number of US citizens have been killed in battle as on 9/11
Oh and let's not talk about how the officially stated purpose of the Taliban was to kick US armed forces out of Somalia and Saudi Arabia... We chose to get involved in Saudi Arabia's war with Pakistan in the first place! If it's a "war" then US military leadership's decisions are directly responsible for 9/11. The US military leadership has been actively endangering national security with their reckless support for Saudi Arabia's wars for decades, and continue to do so to this day.
US presidents and businessmen sold out their fellow citizens and soldiers to arm an absolute monarchy so Aramco could make money.
This post is wrong for obvious reasons, but it's a good point that it goes both ways: drone strikes create anti-western sentiment, and Muslim terrorist attacks create anti-Muslim sentiment.
yes, they're mutually reinforcing. in a perverse way, u.s. drone strikes are good for terrorist organizations, and terrorist attacks are good for major stakeholders of military capital.
that's why you will see some perverts who will openly reminisce about the days after 9/11 and how we were all united, etc.
at some point, cooler heads should intervene, but fear is just too easy to engineer, apparently.
You seem to actually believe that and I think that deserves a serious answer, because the terror attacks are changing European society. It’s given us some of our only mass shootings from politically motivated right-wingers like Breviek and the recent would be mosque shooter.
What’s worse though is that it’s given us a general apathy toward the bureaucratic abuse of immigrants that happens everywhere. I live in Denmark, we have a place called Sjælsmark, which is an internment camp for immigrants who weren’t granted asylum but refused to leave. I understand why some people would go “well they could just leave”, but there are children in that camp who’ve been there for years. That would have caused a public outcry throughout danish society 25 years ago. I know because that’s exactly what happened during the Balkan wars where society as a whole cake together and did what the government failed to do, and actually integrated the “unwanted” as the decent thing to do.
After 18 years of anti-Islamic sentiment, however, we instead talked about putting the “unwanted” on a prison island to isolate them even further.
That’s what 9/11, Charlie Hebdo, Batavian and so on has done to Europe.
How many "error's" does the US make? Far too many for them to be called "error's" anymore. How many kids were radicalised by the US going into Iraq and killing millions of their people? Tens of thousands of orphans, with an evil imperial army coming into their home, bombing their farms, raiding their homes, murdering civilians. Enough to create ISIS and radicalise thousands upon thousands more.
How many families were put out by 9/11? About 3000. And you call that an excuse to invade Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Pakistan etc etc etc. So 3000 American lives, taken by Saudi Arabian citizens, cost the lives of millions across the world so that the American people can feel good about their hegemony?
Al-Qaeda won that war before the US even left their own soil. They had one aim, bring about the end of the USA, and they did it by getting your own government to strip away civil liberties overnight, and you didn't even care.
Usually it's measured in the ratio of civilian casualties to combatants, and as far as I remember, US is keeping this ratio exceptionally low in comparison to other conflicts.
That's the key point here: your criticism applies to any war at all. War is hell, everybody knows that. To be objective in your judgement about US though, you have to quantatively compare different conflicts to each other.
Unfortunately, neither do many Americans who have been affected by terrorism as well (majority most likely). I'm not saying that's how I feel, but I don't think it's going out on a limb to say that it's probably true.
But it is EXCEPTIONALLY low - even more so than I remember.
> Starting in the 1980s, it was often claimed that 90 percent of the victims of modern wars were civilians.
> The Vietnamese government has estimated the number of Vietnamese civilians killed in the Vietnam War at two million, and the number of NVA and Viet Cong killed at 1.1 million—estimates which approximate those of a number of other sources.[19] This would give a civilian-combatant fatality ratio of approximately 2:1, or 67%.
> During the First Chechen War, 4,000 separatist fighters and 40,000 civilians are estimated to have died, giving a civilian-combatant ratio of 10:1.
So essentially what you're saying is that it's ok to kill million's of people in Iraq and Afghanistan as long as it fit's into a ratio that they're killing enough enemies to make civilians inconsequential? What utter bullshit you spout and a sad world you live occupy in your own head.
Anti-ideology is still an ideology, see Lacan's Book XXI "The Non-Duped Err". You can veil your imperialistic ideology behind some idea of an "objective" evaluation but it's transparent to everyone and everyone.
Maybe US just finally met nation/group of individuals pissed off enough to care and go and deliver revenge the deem adequate. I mean, expecting that some random casualties ratio being upheld means all is a-OK is a bit ridiculous, don't you think?
After all the hell and atrocities done by US in Vietnam, I absolutely do not understand how there was no strong resent towards US anymore after the war to the point of actively seeking and eliminating US targets like terrorist/spies do.
It was a humbling realization for me, and I have great respect for Vietnamese people not only for this.
But you are not really opposing his theory.
The terrorists are counting on this effect.
They want to trigger radicalization of the populous in their target countries.
Their idea is to stir up war, because in chaos there's a potential of drastic radical changes.
If you truly want to fight terror, you should focus on prevention and educating the masses to not get drawn to a blood thirsty revenge cycle. Because once you start thinking like a terrorist, i.e. justifying civilian bloodshed for ideology, demanding violent response, etc. they win.
If the West (and USSR/Russia) hadn't been meddling in the political and social affairs of the Middle East for decades, it's completely possible that we wouldn't have any/many Middle Eastern terrorists with the funding and capabilities to do any damage outside their own countries.
It's tempting to suggest, "or if we had done a better job with our meddling", but... no, it just doesn't work, empirically so, and we should stop doing it.
Unfortunately, pushing diplomatic solutions hard would be political suicide in the US; the "us vs. them" mentality is strong here, and I don't think most Americans would be ok with what they'd see as giving in or giving up. And even if the politics at home could work, it's unclear if all that many on the other side are interested in a diplomatic solution, given how radicalized some of them have become due to our recklessness and hubris.
Also stories like this will be passed down for generations to recruit new jihadists/terrorists. They use this stuff as proof that the USA is anti-muslim or to prove that there is a war against muslims going on. You simply cannot bomb your way out of resolving the terrorism issue. This will probably have the same effectiveness as the war on drugs: lots of money spent....little to no impact on drug smuggling/drug abuse etc.
> They use this stuff as proof that the USA is anti-muslim or to prove that there is a war against muslims going on.
And the worst thing is: from a policy perspective (obviously not arguing about every single US citizen) that's really hard to argue with, given which countries the US has entered into armed conflicts with, which groups of people are most picked upon by politicians, etc.
I think 'entered into armed conflict with' is a judicious way to put it, given 9/11 and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Neither of these are fights the USA would have freely chosen.
But for every confict in which the USA is fighting one group of Muslims, it's doing so to protect or ally with another group of Muslims. The Afghan government are Muslims, the elected Iraqi government are Muslims, the victims of IS and the Taliban are overwhelmingly Muslims. Saudi Arabia, the west's biggest ally in the region is Muslim. We are allying with tens of millions of Muslims against groups consisting of thousands of Muslims. The west has far, far more Muslim allies than Muslim enemies.
Luckily (for muslims), the focus of racism is slowly changing to Chinese people now. It is as if Americans (and most others) can't exist without an ethnicity to be mad about.
This seems to surprise everyone though, and I don't understand why.
I remember in the early days of our being in Afghanistan, there were a few media pieces reporting that they remembered the last time the British were there, 100 or 150 years ago. The tone was very much that it was somehow surprising the Afghans brought this up again.
Yet Britain and the US are built on national history, myths and memories. The US has a huge national story around independence and the push west into the frontier. The UK has our tales and myths of 1940 and 1066. Scots still remember "the 45" (that's 1745). Why wouldn't Afghanistan or Iraq?
People should travel (and live!) more abroad for a while. As you wrote, many seem to be surprised that the people living in Asia, Africa, etc. are humans too (in the sense of: people with history, dreams, expectations on life, etc.)
My hope is that the Internet will have the positive effect of removing this misperception in the long run.
Personally, my eyes were opened quite a while ago when the US dropped one of the largest conventional bombs on some mountain region in Afghanistan where they suspected Taliban leaders to hide out. The next day some guy on Reddit wrote (loosely paraphrased) "Hey, that's were I always travel with my motorbike! Glad I wasn't there when that bomb went down..." and posted a picture of where the bomb hit, with his motorbike in the foreground.
The British oppressed the Irish for 800 years with a systematic destruction of culture and contribution to genocide which halved the population and then recently had the audacity to assume Ireland would be allies during Brexit negotiations.
The negotiations and the deal were extremely dumb in many ways (as is Brexit overall), but this is a really weird take on it. It does make sense that Britain would try to use the fact that Ireland has a substantial amount of trade with the UK and it is not inconceivable that Ireland might therefore in its own self-interest want some sort of deal.
You're mistaken if you think that even the more recent atrocities like the great famine or the violent oppression of the Irish home rule (and ultimately independence) movement have informed the Irish response to Brexit negotiations. It is to their credit that they're pragmatic people, since they could easily dish out a black-eye to the UK if they wanted to.
We have a PM who is filmed responding to a protester in front of dozens of press and TV cameras at an event with "there's no press here", while hearing constant shutter clicks audible in the background. That he's completely tone deaf dealing with the EU, our neighbours or electorate shouldn't be the least bit surprising.
That said, since Irish independence there has been a good degree of desired closeness between the two countries, not least the passport free freedom of movement and voting, which survived the worst of the NI violence. Looking back that can seem surprising. Record numbers of Brits have been applying for Irish passports (a remarkably high number are eligible) since the Brexit vote.
I think by bombing other countries and use other military power, US is establishing a target for the terrorists and prone terrorist people, shout out for a peaceful way to solve issues, anyway, it not the policy makers and politicians that got retaliated, it's the innocent civilians.
I hear this a lot but is there any basis for this? Were any of the 9/11 attackers widowed/orphaned by the US? Or were they just whipped up in religious fervor and an abstract idea of a cultural war with the US?
And does it go the other way? Do you create violent anti-Islamists when Muslims commit terror attacks? Were the orphans of 9/11 more likely to sign up for the US military, or commit hate crimes against Muslims than their non-directly-affected peers?
No, there is a vast difference in tactics between rebels and terrorists. Rebels may use terrorism, terrorists may be rebels, but the two are not synonyms.
>Were any of the 9/11 attackers widowed/orphaned by the US? Or were they just whipped up in religious fervor and an abstract idea of a cultural war with the US?
> And does it go the other way? Do you create violent anti-Islamists when Muslims commit terror attacks? Were the orphans of 9/11 more likely to sign up for the US military, or commit hate crimes against Muslims than their non-directly-affected peers?
Yes, of course it does. Hell, even on the recent 9/11 HN thread there were people who said they joined the military after the towers collapsed. It's only natural reaction when your nation gets attacked, and it works the same everywhere.
It's best to think of this as a single self-perpetuating process, with a strong feedback loop of hate and suffering inside. So the US bombs some Muslim countries, and eventually some group manages to pull off a 9/11 in retaliation. US reacts to this by utterly destroying several countries, and in reaction, ISIS is born. Which then US and others attempt to bomb out of existence. Rinse, lather, repeat. A kills B's people, B retaliates by killing A's people, A retaliates to retaliation by killing B's people, ...
Oh they are in the loop, even if they don't see it.
This is how religion is used to get people to do things. You can read anything you like from a religious book; you'll find justification for anything if you comb for quotes enough. This makes religion a glue, or an amplifier, not a prescriber of behavior.
Consider Christianity - the religion that gave us half of what's nice about the Western culture. That same religion using that same, unchanging book, set half of Europe aflame multiple times, for ostensibly religious reasons. When you look at it from outside it looks ridiculous, and when you study history you discover obvious political goals behind the crusades and other European wars - but then, a lot of people fighting and directing forces believed they do it because "God commands it".
It's no different with Islam. Jihad is just an excuse to get people to fight and die for political causes. If the political reasons disappear, they'll soon find an excuse to not fight, and Jihad will again become "the internal struggle".
It does, that's why I said "half of" not "everything". The Western culture is built as much on Roman and Greek legacy as it is on Christianity in Europe. So e.g. while a lot of classical literature is Greek/Roman, classical art and music is mostly from Christianity (and usually religious or semi-religious in nature).
> Your forces occupy our countries; you spread your military bases throughout them; you corrupt our lands, and you besiege our sanctities, to protect the security of the Jews and to ensure the continuity of your pillage of our treasures.
Did you read your own source? Yes, there's more to it than what OP said, but it is true that this was a motivation.
Yeah, yeah. Beliefs gets mixed on, always. But do you seriously believe the Troubles in Ireland were over theological hair splitting about who is the head of the Holy Church? Yet, it was always framed, even in my school books, as a conflict between Catholics and Protestants. Very puzzling if it were only that.
I love how hn is all about logical discussion and data, but when the topic is emotional enough, now anecdotes count for something.
Considering America has concentrated a large number of bombs on Afghanistan, why are they underrepresented in terrorist bombing of American targets? Why didn't the US see a spate of attacks from Cambodia in the 70s?
These are all great stories that have been talked about. But unless there is some kind of supporting evidence, these are still just stories.
I don't know the answers to your questions, but they are good questions. Not inconsistent with the image of a feedback process I presented. As a supporting evidence, I can say that every single case of terrorism or genocide I recall from both news and history lessons always has the perpetrators retaliating for some perceived or real injustice that happened to them, or their forefathers, in the past. Circle of violence isn't a new concept.
No it's not. These types of comments are extremely inappropriate. Your comment tries to suggest that:
1. Terrorists are people with legitimate grievances
2. Terrorists are representatives of oppressed people
3. Terrorists have genuine reasons for their actions
All of these things are false. People do not turn into international, careless murderers just because they experience travesty. Terrorists exploit this concept to try to give themselves legitimacy, but the reality is that it's highly removed from the actual reality of what's happening.
You know what does create terrorists though?
1. Sanctions and
2. Funding of militias.
These are things that everyone - except for isolationists - stand behind and support.
----
Thanks for the 5 downvotes in 10 minutes! Feel free to help me (someone from the region who was directly caught up in not one but two American wars) understand why I should be a terrorist now. I'll also forward the comments to my cousin who was working inside a Red Cross clinic hit by a US airstrike so she also knows what to think. Thanks in advance HN!
Because your average farmer is obviously going to join up with a militia or terrorist group because of some abstract political thing like sanctions, which he probably has trouble even measuring in his day to life.
As opposed to your elected politicians and your military having blown up his daughter at her wedding, scattering her remains over a wide enough area that it is hard even finding anything to bury.
Makes sense.
The only way you're going to get someone mad enough for that, is if the militia you equipped happens to inflict similar cruelties, or you otherwise mess with his nation in a way that is more than just an inconvenience.
If the US imposed sanctions against my country, I'd just shrug. If the US killed my family members and I had no recourse...
> Because your average farmer is obviously going to join up with a militia or terrorist group because of some abstract political thing like sanctions which he probably has trouble even measuring in his day to life.
Sanctions starve people to death, literally. There is a blockade on food, medicine and your entire life savings turn to nothing. Your life becomes rations. It has such a significant effect that this even turned the non-religious Arab nationalist socialist Ba'ath party into an extremist Islamist brigade in under a decade[0].
These sanctions are even one the major stated reason of the 9/11 attacks by Al Qaeda[1] - not that Saudis flying planes into the world trade center somehow represents the suffering of Iraqis.
I'm not even sure why this would be contested, I don't think you understand what sanctions are or what kind of almost-genocidal effects they have[2] but with your comment I'm suddenly understanding the reasoning of the people downvoting me and upvoting others.
Because you seem to be missing that it's not the "sanctions" that radicalize people, but the "starve to death" part, or in general, the "death" part. In so far as heavy sanctions breed resentment and further violence, bombing people's families into tiny pieces does that even more.
> If the US imposed sanctions against my country, I'd just shrug.
You obviously do not understand that sanctions are usually a way to prepare for war with weapons. Sanctions bring up the cracks in societies that are otherwise hidden under a thin layer of comfort we call civilized behavior. With sanctions you get a black market and all that is related to it. Sanctions are a trade war at another level.
Sanctioned people are in a way oppressed people and their grievances may well be legitimate (i.e., "I had a nice family business and now my export targets are gone while I did nothing wrong.") Retaliation probably feels like a genuine reason for their actions too. Many sanctions hit the population while their government hardly feels it (they still have enough to eat, places to live etc.)
All those things you think are false are 100% absolutely true.
Terrorism is a political tactic coming from a power asymmetry and is labeled as such due to this power dynamic as a consequence of who controls the narrative.
labels aside, if x state drops a bomb and kills your 4 year old playing outside you will want revenge, if you're from those areas. Simple as that, call it whatever you want. You killed my son for no reason...
USA should better rush with million dollar offers to families, along with apologies, of course.
Perhaps you are confused with the term "terrorist". s/terrorist/freedom fighter/g. Is that more palatable ? Or is the narrative contextual, depending on which side you find yourself on ?
All three of your assertions are wrong, regardless. And you have no business judging 'appropriateness'. Of course there are criminals that take advantage of situations, I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that they are not the types that blow themselves up to make a quick buck.
What I find shocking about your comment is that your points 1-3 can obviously be true and very often are - and if you don't believe they can be true, then you couldn't possibly understand why terrorism exists in the first place.
The devil is always in the detail, but generally speaking terrorists are violent combatants who pursue certain political goals, but don't have a regular army, and at some point in their life unfortunately accepted the idea that it is legitimate to intentionally harm or kill civilians to reach those goals. Accepting this horrible idea is what makes them terrorists.
More like: you bomb them, they eventually find a way to strike back at you, and then you say you need more weapons and better weapons so "such tragedy never happens again".
Comparing the reactions between this (seemlingly little) reported incident, and the attack on Saudi oil facilites (zero fatalities) is an interesting exercise.
Yeh the difference in the press' reactions between the two is pretty stark. However the most interesting thing about the Saudi attack is the faux outrage at the idea that _Iranian_ arms were used in the attack. As if it's totally cool that British and American arms are used by the Saudis to flatten Yemen but the idea that the Houthis can strike back with Iranian-provided arms is somehow a despicable disgrace.
Do you think it might have something to do with one attack reducing the nut harvesting capacity of that town by 50%, versus the other reducing the oil output of Saudi Arabia by 50%?
Or maybe because one was a tactical op gone horribly wrong based on bad intel from the ground, and the other was a well planned and highly coordinated strategic op designed to destabilize international markets?
_What USA does_ is terrorism. When you drop bombs on people out of nowhere, that's called terrorism. Sorry if you're an American but you've got some learning to do about the biggest terrorist organization in the world before calling others a terrorist. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRbnPA3fd5U
Only in some situations. In a lot of situations it works as intended. The crucial point is being able to distinguish when it applies and when it doesn't.
This is not a small thing, it easily steers your life only to where it works. In other words your life becomes a slave of your limited logic, it makes you optimize your life for the logic to be a safe and working.
bit of a flawed response really. i cant think of many subject matters that are more nuanced than middle-eastern affairs. almost nothing is black and white in this area
And the Islamic State is finished with this strike?
I urge you to take a closer look at U.S. drone strike programs and how effective they are. It's closer to 0 than it is to 100%. The U.S. takes no responsibility for its actions in the world stage, like ever. Have you even seen US held accountable for anything?
Yeah if US wasn't so hell-bent to be excluded from International Court of Justice in Hague, we would see quite a few US servicemen (and mercenaries from companies like Blackwater), err sorry 'patriots' being tried there and getting long/life sentences.
This definition only reinforces the parent's point. What it rules out as "not terrorism" is regular organized crime, which isn't too much into bombings anyway. Bombs are almost never used without a political/ideological agenda, because they're too expensive and require too much coordination to make, maintain and deploy.
Except that to some extent, they do. When my country was occupied by the Nazi Germany, people who fought back were called freedom fighters by us. They were called terrorists by the Nazis.
My point being, one country's terrorist is another country's freedom fighter. There is some nuance here, but we're talking about somewhat random and indiscriminate murder of civilians who may or may not be connected to a military group in hopes people at large will stop supporting that group. There's a political agenda in there, and there's death of innocent civilians. There's strong element of fear too - I remember reading articles about drone strikes in Pakistan years ago, in which it was reported that the locals developed a fear of clear blue sky. A fear of good weather, because that's when drones come.
If one objects to calling it terrorism because they're really trying to hit the combatants only, and objects to calling it a war crime because technically there's no war with an internationally recognized nation state, then how should we call it?
You're wrong, all those WWII resistance fighters were by definition terrorists to germans/japanese. Its just that US marketing over-used the term in past decade and a half to label anybody inconvenient as a justified target for extermination because 'national security'
I think terrorism is killing random members of a population to scare the others into some political or ideological change. It wouldn't count if it was targeted at fighters and civilians got killed by accident.
That sounds like a reasonable definition. But how would this definition qualify the Taliban attacks on military bases and police stations in Afghanistan?
I think one would need to put something like that as a guerrilla war.
There needs to be a distinction between:
* attacking civilians (terrorism)
* attacking The System, but going for softer targets and not taking its military might directly head on (guerilla war)
* attacking The System, in a Military v Military setting (regular warfare)
While there are groups that will never have the direct strength to take a head on fight, I think it's beneficial to have a category showing that they limit their targets to agents of the system rather than any random civilian.
Good you mention cures for polio. The US does both cures for polio and ensuring polio exists and spreads, by virtue of CIA pretending to be agents of vaccination charities, which killed polio eradication efforts in some places.
Point being, the US does a lot of things. Some good, some bad. You don't get to trade the good things for the bad things. There could be progress in art, science and humanities without indiscriminate drone bombings of innocent civilians worldwide.
How dare people criticize the U.S. They certainly created art, science and the humanities, not to mention put them in books to civilize all those shithole countries?
I was not aware that curing polio is a global absolution of sins.
Oh, right ... America bashing is popular therefore it is righteous.
It’s so fashionable to hate America, that must make it true.
Why do you work for an American company then?
Hypocrisy. Absolute disgusting hypocrisy every time.
The role of America’s military in maintain a relatively peaceful world is unpopular, but has prevented a Third World War thus far.
Every decade there is less war and violent death than the one before, because of the use of United States military power. It’s true, and it’s so effective some people naively think it can be somehow done away with.
What prevented World War 3 so far was Mutually Assured Desctruction. "M.A.D." is beginning to look a bit long in the tooth, but it's clinging on to life yet.
Man stop drinking the kool-aid. You're lapping up your countries propoganda left, right and center. Apparently according to you, art, science and the humanities wouldn't exist if not for the USA? Get out of here, this is hackernews not 4chan.
IS was created after the US destroyed Iraq, based on false evidence (just like America invaded Afghanistan based on false reasons).
The damage is done, but why persist? What do you expect to happen exactly?
In fact Russia consolidated its influence and alliances in the middle east just by exploiting American mistakes there.
Just leave. It would be a hugely popular move everywhere: among the left, the right, veterans, other countries, etc. So why not do it?
> It’s so fashionable to hate America, that must make it true.
Let's be honest here, US is trying hard for last 15 years to be the most hated country anywhere, ever.
Millions of innocent civilians killed based on outright lies by US president in Iraq 2nd war (they were so glaringly obvious on UN meeting when GWB presented them that Germany and France outright rejected joining. UK couldn't care less). The consequences are felt across half of Asia and whole Europe till these days. Please tell me, what justice system in US does to a person who kills innocents without any reason? Nothing good. And if you kill millions? Good pension and CIA protection for rest of your life apparently. Plus Afghanistan, yet another battlefield where mighty US army is losing a battle with guys with AKs.
Another topic is online privacy, US could have been champion of freedom, and initially it was, but we had Snowden and stuff ain't better since then. That's plain amoral. Currently US can't claim much moral superiority over China for outsiders, like it or not.
I ain't even touching the topic of current US president because that would be for a separate thread.
To like US and its role in current politics these days requires super strong tint on ones pink glasses. Most of the world is kind of fed up and just wants to be left alone, not invaded for US version of 'freedom', oil, strategic place or whatever.
This is real world out there, where 95% of the mankind lives.
I mean, the US are not even 250 years old and built by immigrants. The rest of the world didn't wait for them for science, medicine, art and philosophy. From a social standpoint they're still 20-30 years behind most EU countries for example.
I think most americans fail to recognise how much propaganda they're constantly fed about how great the US are. From the outside it almost looks like a parody, especially since Trump is in the office.
Example: https://www.vox.com/2014/6/16/5814270/the-successful-70-year...
It sounds like you judge people by the consequences of their actions rather than their intentions. I tend to agree with that way of thinking but many people do the opposite and believe intentions are the morally superior way of judging good and bad.
The trouble with judging by actions is it makes everybody bad, including the judge! I suspect that's why people don't like it. Since nearly everyone believes their own intentions are good, judging by intentions preserves their own sense of goodness even if they contribute to a few killings by accident/negligence.
When it comes to this, taking intent on faith isn't good enough. Vietnam, a possible war of aggression in Iraq, illegal drone strikes in Pakistan, public threats and shows of force - the stick isn't subtle and I think it's fair to question whether it's measured (and what it means if it isn't).
I actually think I'm right of center on this issue in general, I just wish we called it as it is.
That's a fine and dandy distinction until it's not.
If you keep punching me in the face while claiming it was your intention to punch someone else I'm going to come to the conclusion sooner rather than later that you're lying or stupid or incompetent – either way I'm going to do something about it rather than continue to let you punch me in the face.
Is it too much to ask that a lot more effort be expended in not mowing down innocent civilians while prosecuting the so-called global-war-on-terror?
Why not just kill those children and friends then, since we have reasonable expectation that they will become radicalized? We already extensively kill the family and children of terrorists
Not that this isn't a tragedy (and/or mass murder depending on your viewpoint), but I don't think hackernews is the right venue for this.
Hackernews should try and keep to tech and away from politics or its quality will continue to degrade. For instance the comments here are mostly not saying anything that hasn't already been said a thousand times before (is this just outrage porn?).
> , but I don't think hackernews is the right venue for this
I would think the same, but then you’ve got things like project Maven which is very closely related to things like US drone strikes and which definitely deserves its place on HN. For example in this particular case, I’d be interested to know how the initial identification has been made from aerial views alone (I suppose they were based on aerial views) that those nut pickers were the bad guys (when in fact they weren’t): was it a manual recognition task? An automatic one? (i.e. image recognition).
Again, this pretty much looks like a false positive issue with great “chances” of having been caused by an automatic process, so it definitely has its place on HN.
I'd agree with you if a noticable proportion of the comments so far had any discussion of the technical aspects, but they don't. (Two out of the 40 comments could maybe be considered discussing the technical aspects and yours goes into the most depth)
Technology has consequences that are ethical issues because it has influence on the lives of real people.
If you create a technology that is used to abuse other people(like facebook spying or manipulating masses or the military invading other countries), you are responsible for it.
The quality of HN improves if the human side of technology and science is openly discussed.
If a drone kills 30 people it is not "porn". It is a very serious matter.
Would you call it outrage porn if those 30 people were from your family?
Maybe it's just rose colored glasses, but I used HN a few years ago, left and then returned recently. It seems when I was first using it, political stuff in general was discouraged and shut down pretty quickly than now, but of course, my initial sentence applies.
Both the Taliban and the US are killing innocent civillian bystanders. This is more and more common with drone strikes. It was konwn that it's pine nut picking season and the governor of the province was informed. There was wither miscomunication or the US forces simply ignored the fact and launched the strike anyway.
The Taliban were all too coward to plant a car bomb in the proximity of the government intelligence department building, so what they did was to plant it next to a nearby hospital.
I wonder what the reasoning for this attack was. When they pulled the trigger, were they attempting to target a specific individual or groups? The article mentions that groups of IS were alleged to be using the fields for training. What kind of calculation of civilian casualties or risks goes into this decision? How do citizens of the US/Nato countries understand what that calculation is, or is that policy effectively out of the control of the populace at large, vested only in the wartime decisionmakers? Will there be any discussion of this or justification, or is that beyond the reporting responsibilities of the AP?
It would be an interesting experiment for the US military to try stop killing people. It would mean that if you say had a bunch of ISIS guys going to kill civilians like they did in Iraq you'd have to find a non lethal way of stopping them like drones with tasers or maybe diplomacy / bribery. It would be an interesting tech challenge to make non lethal AI drones say that could stop a traditional military.
On a side note it's very interesting to re-watch Rambo III, where he teams up with local jihadists in Afghanistan to fight the occupying Soviets in the area. Hollywood propaganda at its finest, but brutally ironic today.
Notice the wording - the drone targeted the workers. The drone didn’t make a decision and target the workers, the drone pilot targeted the workers, and whomever was standing behind them gave the order to launch the missle. The whole “I’m just doing what the computer said” defense only works in movies.
Imagine being the person (even if you had little personal autonomy in the matter) who pulled the trigger or pressed the button. Imagine finding out what you had done. Would it break you?
I suspect it’s more along the lines of not wanting to be the guy who killed the least number of people that week because you have to buy the first round come Friday night.
Someone should correct me if I am wrong, but military training is mostly about obeying orders and desensitizing about what's going on the receiving end of your actions.
I have watched Restrepo on Netflix and found one thing interesting, that biggest thing soldiers have missed in their civilian lives is the adrenaline/joy rush of a shoot-out, no matter how dangerous it is. Paradoxically most of the interviewees are clearly suffering from some levels of PTSD, because probably you cannot be trained for when you see your friend's body/face to be blown apart.
It would be interesting to hear from someone in the military or someone with military psychology training knowledge, how this works. Seems that soldiers are fine with killing "the enemy", but seeing death of your friends gives you (understandably) PTSD.
I usually avoid these conversations about the military, because it's such a hot button issue. I have many family members who were/are in the military. I have one family member who died in WW2, buried in a US cemetery in France.
> but military training is mostly about obeying orders
Not at all. The military wants individuals to think for themselves. Strictly obeying orders would never get the job done. In fact, the large majority of military training is industrial/trade depending on the branch. When people see bootcamp, and orders being thrown around that's less of learning to obey and more of making people into a cohesive team (breakdown, then buildup). Think about how tight a startup team is after going through hell to get a product launched. Very similar but even tighter.
> that biggest thing soldiers have missed in their civilian lives is the adrenaline/joy rush of a shoot-out, no matter how dangerous it is
A very small percentage of the military ever gets in a firefight, again depending on branch. Of course there is an adrenaline rush that comes out of being in danger (just shooting guns in general is a rush). Every time I paddle out into big surf or when I have sky dived, the chance I may die is part of the 'fun'. I've never been in a shoot-out, but from what I've read it's those experiences X 100 or more. Finally, these are the exact type of people we want fighting. The best way to survive and win is to go all in 100%. When someone is there, on the ground being shot at, the time for them to debate is over.
> Seems that soldiers are fine with killing "the enemy"
Keep in mind that the US has strict rules of engagement (mistakes are sometimes made as reports have shown). By the time a soldier is killing the enemy they are also going to be receiving fire. Effectively if they do not kill this person, this person will kill them. Seeing friends die is obviously hard because they are your friends, and because of the way teams are built people end up very close.
With all that said, the military is the execution arm of politicians. A soldier on the ground has about as much power to decide to be in or out of war as you or I. People join for a lot of reasons. Financial is a common one. But, a lot of people also join out of a duty and a draw to be of service to a country they love regardless of who is POTUS at any given time.
>By the time a soldier is killing the enemy they are also going to be receiving fire.
I think this is what concerns people so much about the drone strikes. Clearly drone strikes are one sided fire fights. And even by the government's own statistics their signal to noise kill ratio is abysmal. This is categorically different than a soldier on the ground returning fire even if we might disagree with the soldier having been sent there in the first place.
Yeah, drone strikes are a tricky situation. On one hand, it's great that no Americans are put in harms way (other than the philosophical question if war should be so 'easy'), but I think we have seen time and again that intelligence is not good enough to kill others without having people on the ground.
This is not a new problem though. Cruise missiles did this for years before drones. Drones are just more prolific now, and we are more likely to see the aftermath.
There's a reason they are sitting in trailers half a world away operating the drones usually. Detachment. You're looking at a grainy image, from altitude, on a monitor many time zones away.
Even being in a conventional aircraft you are largely removed from the situation because you are thousands (or tens of thousands) of feet above your target and any individual is an unrecognizable speck that your weapon system strikes after you're already well past your target.
This is a problem, for society, with modern warfare. You can sit a mile away and 'paint' a target with IR for someone else to fire a missile with, or you can call in on your radio coordinates and have artillery take out your target from even farther away, or you can effectively emulate a video game and drop a bomb on a few pixels in Afghanistan while sitting in an air conditioned trailer in Nevada. You can wage war without ever having to see the face of the enemy, you strip the enemy of their humanity making it easier to kill.
I imagine some drone operators struggle with severe depression but I imagine it's generally less than an infantrymen that was in CQB firefights in Ramadi or Fallujah or a trench in WWI.
Modern warfare allows us to be cold and calculating, it allows us to pause our humanity. It's good for a military but it's bad for civilization.
It doesn't work even in the movies. Last American movie I watched which featured a drone strike against civilians, involved an advanced AI that recommended not to proceed because of insufficient information, that got overruled by the president. The drone strike hit a wedding, which led to increase in attack on Americans, making the AI attempt to kill the president and most of the US government, following the "protect against all enemies, foreign and domestic" doctrine.
The only sentence that says »[...] a drone targeted [the workers] [...]« is a quote from a tribal elder. I think the wording in the article is actually pretty good and Reuters has, as far as I know, pretty high standards for their wording in general, for example they never call someone a terrorist.
What? That defense was presented 0 times in the article.
Here's the relevant U.S. quote, "U.S. forces conducted a drone strike..." the subject is clear and there is no equivocating about who was responsible for the drone strike.
It’s possible some autonomous system marked them as candidates,
> In 2014, former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden said in a public debate, “We kill people based on metadata.”
> According to multiple reports and leaks, death-by-metadata could be triggered, without even knowing the target’s name, if too many derogatory checks appear on their profile. “Armed military aged males” exhibiting suspicious behavior in the wrong place can become targets, as can someone “seen to be giving out orders.” Such mathematics-based assassinations have come to be known as “signature strikes.”
> Notice the wording - the drone targeted the workers. ... The whole “I’m just doing what the computer said” defense only works in movies.
Fair enough, but I would not read too much into that choice of words. For example:
“The workers had lit a bonfire and were sitting together when a drone targeted them,” tribal elder Malik Rahat Gul told Reuters by telephone from Wazir Tangi.
I don't believe that Malik Rahat Gul (or possibly, his translator) was attempting to relieve anyone of moral agency or responsibility, do you?
I do see at first glance it could be seen as a simple choice of words, however, I do think it really leaves many readers with a different takeaway.
“The workers had lit a bonfire and were sitting together when a drone targeted them,” tribal elder Malik Rahat Gul told Reuters by telephone from Wazir Tangi.
“The workers had lit a bonfire and were sitting together when a drone pilot targeted them,” tribal elder Malik Rahat Gul told Reuters by telephone from Wazir Tangi.
Someone needs to tell that guy to choose his words a little more carefully after dozens of his neighbors are killed.
I think the person I was responding to was implying that the wording was chosen to downplay what had been done. I don't think that is likely, given the identity of the only person quoted in the article to use that choice of words.
Would be really so unthinkable a high army charge going to the area to make in place a public televised apology to those people, asking how can help alleviate this disaster, and returning the families a little dignity at least?
And please journalists, stop referring to the people as "tribal this" or "tribal that". To always focus on that point is unnecessary and disrespective. A father is a father in any part of the world.
318 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 279 ms ] threadThe normalizing of imperialistic murder abroad is not an anomaly; it is a core part of US identity. The US itself is a product of imperialistic murder, its crowning achievement even.
To this day US soldiers deployed abroad use the term “indian country” to designate occupied territory where they conduct counter-insurgency operations. That term dates back to counter-insurgency operations conducted by the very same institution against Native Americans until 100 years ago. What was once abroad is now domestic - such is the nature of empire.
If X was not the USG, then the USG would care and probably go to war with any countries potentially related to, or sounding similar to, X
Why these mass murderers are allowed to flourish in our society is a continuing source of dismay for me.
Or, God forbid, Iran kills 30 Saudis in Saud.
We've been exposed to so much propaganda that we instinctively know what is "worse", and who is "allowed" to kill without due process.
But it does not mean you are right: Afganistan cannot attack the US over 30 dead civillians, the US can attack Iran for some Saudi property destruction by Yemenis who are being raped by Saudi using US weaponery on them.
I meant: But it does not mean you not are right
Alternatively if Yemen rebels attack Saudi Arabia, that’s bad. If Iran does it, everybody in a thousand mile radius starts sweating.
Why is it bad? I mean, after they've been at the receiving end of Saud's war machine, why can they not retaliate? They sure did not cause as much boodshed (zero, just material damage) as the Sauds have caused them.
I agree. This separation I find problematic. How often we hear "I want to be vegan (for the animals = moral) but I cannot give up cheese/meat/etc (too convenient/tasty = practical)"
To me they are not separate. Oppression is oppression, I hate it regardless who does it or how inconvenient it is to stop it.
FTFY
Just imagine China start to playing news such like this in those concentration camps, free golden material for showing people how rightful it is to follow the lead of CCP I'd say.
While it is true the U.S. is benefiting from it's strong global influence, but it is also true that nobody wants to be threatened. If the U.S. don't want to be the good guy in this game, at least don't be the bad one.
It's not like killing a person with certain beliefs stops the beliefs from spreading.
Also, killing people with beliefs does stop beliefs from spreading. How much of Afghanistan do the Taliban control these days, anyway?
The idea was that "possible US engagement saves more civilians than it kills", and I was reacting to that, as it is very doubtful.
I didn't say it would be ok to live under Taliban. But there are other weird islamic countries, where I wouldn't want to live either. Do you propose US making war there, too?
In fact we actually grow opium in Australia.
Suppose that was a crime. Who punishes the criminals? Maybe that is exactly what the US sees itself doing?
Unfortunately to punish war criminals, usually you have to win against them in a war.
Also I think they changed their allegiances, so they became terrorist towards US people?
Funny you ask... It was called the cold war, you might want to look it up. US was a pretty big player there.
Before cold war, there was WWII, and communist revolutions.
I don't want to defend any particular war, I just think it may all be a bit more complicated than a simple "we shouldn't have started any wars".
“France knowingly harbors 911 terrorists.”
“French leaders take credit for car bombing which kills 23 civilians.”
There’s a historical reason for this discrepancy.
That war is absurd and should have stopped a long time ago. It's just fueling more terrorism. All western countries should leave the middle east, for good, forever (except maybe the odd ship to secure shipping lanes and stuff like that, but you get my point).
If you don't think that way, assuming that you're from US, you should demand an answer for each and every civilian death.
We don’t conduct missions in Afghanistan for funsies. We do it because there is no State we can lean on to stamp down on the extremists.
None of that is true in the US. People who say “hurr durr but Republicans are a white nationalist party” do so out of ignorance, because they have no idea what it’s like to have extremists actually threaten your democracy. And their ignorance is dangerous. It’s dangerous to a world that needs US leadership to overcome extremism. Their false equivalency and apologism undermines the people in countries like Bangladesh who continue to fight for liberal democracy and the rule of law.
What’s the threat, again? I forgot.
1. So the CIA can smuggle heroin to big pharma, and fund black projects. (largely unsubstantiated position)
2. To occupy overland energy routes, disrupting the ability of China to build infrastructure linking to Iran. The whole One Belt/One Road thing is intended to construct an alternative to China's very vulnerable maritime lines of communication, reducing the risk of a resource import blockade by the US Navy. They can't get a oil or gas pipeline from Iran if the A-stan government is in the back pocket of the US, and US military bases sit astride the route.
3. To present the risk of a 2nd front (1st front = Iraq, Persian Gulf), boxing in Iran. Not a major jump-off point for a land invasion (due to logistical constraints) but could serve as basing for aviation assets and special operations raids into the parts of Iran on the eastern side of the Zagros Mountains.
Personally, I don't think any of those reasons is valid for staying there.
>>>What’s the threat, again? I forgot.
Basically we've spent decades playing whack-a-mole, attacking symptoms instead of root causes. And one of those root causes is....our mole-whacking kills far too many innocent civilians.
Isn’t it just a little ironic that one of our “allies” was harboring OBL?
Lesson learned: nukes are a VERY effective deterrent to foreign invasion. That’s what we’re teaching countries in the Middle East.
I also wish news sources would be more careful about suggesting that there are autonomous killer robots in the sky. The drone didn't target anything. A remote pilot did, based on information he/she was provided.
Truck attacks, drone attacks, knife attacks - one might be forgiven for thinking these objects have developed minds of their own.
Or perhaps the insinuation is that most humans themselves are mere instruments of the cultures and institutions they're embedded in.
If we assume this was not intentional, then the two most probable causes are human or technical or any combination of both.
A drone can't land, open Skype and allow an interrogator to speak with the locals in their language- it flies high, have limited visibility and the interpretation of the incoming data is based on prior intelligence.
If you look at the pictures you'll see that pine nut farmers looks the same as IS Jihadi terrorists, both use civilian clothes and sometimes they are actually the same person.
(They ran out of other things to fight.)
They arrest people who share pesto recipes, or search for pesto on the web. New technology is deployed to detect and suppress the Improvised Pesto Dishes found in roadside cafes, especially the deadly Rocket Pesto.
There are small Caribbean islands where Pestofarians openly consume pasta with pesto. The Colombian Green Pesto Cartel has entered a bloody feud with the Red Pesto Brigades. However, I understand some US states are legalizing pesto now.
What about the feelings of the children and friends after 9.11, Charlie Hebdo, Bataclan, Nice, Stockholm, Trèbes, Paris, Liège and Strasbourg? I could go on. Of the 24 jihadist attacks in the EU in 2018, 10 occurred in France, four in the United Kingdom, four in the Netherlands, two in Germany and one each in Belgium, Italy, Spain and Sweden. In 2017, a total of 62 people were killed in ten completed jihadist attacks in the European Union, according to Europol figures. The number of attempted jihadist attacks reached 33 in 2017.
If a single drone strike is how you create terrorists, what is being created in Europe?
The drone killings are anonymous, out of the sky, with no idea who the guilty party is besides a nebulous "USA" or "the West"; a vacuum of information besides a robotic, faceless apology in a press release (that is itself just more insult, more humiliation), and the knowledge that a foreign country can reach out and murder people living next door to you without consequence. The humiliation and rage and sense of powerlessness and living every day knowing that they'll do it again and nobody will do anything about it simply festers. These are key ingredients in growing terrorists. This is how you make terrorists. Humilation and anger and a sense of powerlessness and that the perpetrator will face no justice.
When some idiot boy shoots up an office in Paris there's a guilty party, a reckoning with a body (or an arrest), a name, an investigation and professional state employees actively going after someone, actively pursuing justice (very different to the state doing no more than shrugging and saying "yeah, that's the USA for you, they murder you and your neighbours, nothing we can do about it"). There is a qualitative difference; the key ingredients above aren't present. Even if the terrorist gets away, it's recognised that it was an individual(s) and that they are being pursued; someone is seeking justice on your behalf.
If a single drone strike is how you create terrorists, what is being created in Europe?
On the face of it, not terrorists.
That's a tough sell when (large) parts of communities are complicit, hiding, funding, supporting the individuals.
It's my impression that the primary difference is that we expect better from advanced nations and their citizens, not that there's a large difference in behavior. Denmark officially murdering people because of their sexual identity would be a shock. Saudi Arabia doing the same isn't, because we don't see SA anywhere near the level of (cultural, social, civilizational) development of Denmark. A child throwing a temper tantrum is normal, an adult doing the same raises suspicion of delayed development.
I'm unconvinced; I believe it's not a tough sell. This is based on my observations of to whom people ascribe these crimes. They blame individuals first. Even if they should ascribe more blame to the organisations behind those individuals, those individuals are recognised (rightly or wrongly) as the primary culprits.
When I see news reports of such things, it's individual people that are presented as the culprits. News articles and Wiki articles name the individuals involved. While they do have organisations and groups behind them, if you ask people "who did this" you don't get a nebulous set of organisations; you get a name.
That depends on who those individuals are though. The media reports and reactions do change very much if you exchange some words, like replacing "islamist radical" with "white supremacist" or "christian fundamentalist" and "mosque" with "website".
You will certainly get individual names for each attack, the difference is whether having those names concludes the investigation or not. There are exceptions to this, of course, it's just my general expression.
you put parentheses around the "large" but I'm still gonna pick on this. For my part, I have yet to hear of a major jihadist attack in the west in which the perpetrators and their supporters were not completely surrounded by police and intelligence personel. In Germany we're watching a parliamentary commission pick apart what happened in the "lone wolf" case where someone drove a truck into a christmas market in Berlin. "You can't do anything about these things!" people exclaim. They're lone wolves after all. BS. That guy, and his supporters, were in constant contact with embedded sources around their milieu. I'm not a big friend of the police state as it is, and especially of intelligence services. And this story and others like it make it really hard to still believe in incompetence and bad coordination as the sources for all the fuck-ups that lead to him succeeding in the first place, and then the crucial witnesses being conveniently deported days after.
But my real point (sorry for digressing here for a bit) is that even in this in-depth investigation, the number of active supporters was tiny. And they were not even really organized. It was more like "I have a friend here ho will help me out, and one here, and one here." Your statement (even with parentheses) does not reflect how small these "parts" are.
2) False equivalent, if you think the USA should be held to the same standards that we hold the terrorists to then effectively the USA have become terrorists as well.
3) The EU has taken its attacks so far quite well, no other countries were invaded, no mass deportations or murders of muslims or immigrants have happened. Unfortunately this bs has shifted the political climate.
Please try to argue your case better.
Wars aren’t as simple as good guys vs bad guys fighting between their own respective countries.
The US allied with the Northern Alliance after invading Afghanistan, and they had no say in whether we invaded or not.
The US asked the Taliban to extradite Osama Bin Laden, they refused, so the US invaded Afghanistan to bring him to justice and dismantle the Taliban.
The US killed Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban is just as powerful today as they were then. The conflict has also killed over 100,000 civilians, and almost the same number of US citizens have been killed in battle as on 9/11
Oh and let's not talk about how the officially stated purpose of the Taliban was to kick US armed forces out of Somalia and Saudi Arabia... We chose to get involved in Saudi Arabia's war with Pakistan in the first place! If it's a "war" then US military leadership's decisions are directly responsible for 9/11. The US military leadership has been actively endangering national security with their reckless support for Saudi Arabia's wars for decades, and continue to do so to this day.
US presidents and businessmen sold out their fellow citizens and soldiers to arm an absolute monarchy so Aramco could make money.
that's why you will see some perverts who will openly reminisce about the days after 9/11 and how we were all united, etc.
at some point, cooler heads should intervene, but fear is just too easy to engineer, apparently.
What’s worse though is that it’s given us a general apathy toward the bureaucratic abuse of immigrants that happens everywhere. I live in Denmark, we have a place called Sjælsmark, which is an internment camp for immigrants who weren’t granted asylum but refused to leave. I understand why some people would go “well they could just leave”, but there are children in that camp who’ve been there for years. That would have caused a public outcry throughout danish society 25 years ago. I know because that’s exactly what happened during the Balkan wars where society as a whole cake together and did what the government failed to do, and actually integrated the “unwanted” as the decent thing to do.
After 18 years of anti-Islamic sentiment, however, we instead talked about putting the “unwanted” on a prison island to isolate them even further.
That’s what 9/11, Charlie Hebdo, Batavian and so on has done to Europe.
You actually got my point, that these wars and terror attacks have a large effect on feelings and behaviours in Europe as well.
How many families were put out by 9/11? About 3000. And you call that an excuse to invade Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Pakistan etc etc etc. So 3000 American lives, taken by Saudi Arabian citizens, cost the lives of millions across the world so that the American people can feel good about their hegemony?
Al-Qaeda won that war before the US even left their own soil. They had one aim, bring about the end of the USA, and they did it by getting your own government to strip away civil liberties overnight, and you didn't even care.
Usually it's measured in the ratio of civilian casualties to combatants, and as far as I remember, US is keeping this ratio exceptionally low in comparison to other conflicts.
That's the key point here: your criticism applies to any war at all. War is hell, everybody knows that. To be objective in your judgement about US though, you have to quantatively compare different conflicts to each other.
Ratio of 15-20% civilian deaths is not "exceptionally low" by any means.
> Starting in the 1980s, it was often claimed that 90 percent of the victims of modern wars were civilians.
> The Vietnamese government has estimated the number of Vietnamese civilians killed in the Vietnam War at two million, and the number of NVA and Viet Cong killed at 1.1 million—estimates which approximate those of a number of other sources.[19] This would give a civilian-combatant fatality ratio of approximately 2:1, or 67%.
> During the First Chechen War, 4,000 separatist fighters and 40,000 civilians are estimated to have died, giving a civilian-combatant ratio of 10:1.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualty_ratio#Cheche...
"Trump Revokes Obama-Era Rule on Disclosing Civilian Casualties From U.S. Airstrikes Outside War Zones"
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/06/us/politics/trump-civilia...
After all the hell and atrocities done by US in Vietnam, I absolutely do not understand how there was no strong resent towards US anymore after the war to the point of actively seeking and eliminating US targets like terrorist/spies do.
It was a humbling realization for me, and I have great respect for Vietnamese people not only for this.
It starts with grocer's apostrophes, but before long everyone's splitting infinitives.
It's tempting to suggest, "or if we had done a better job with our meddling", but... no, it just doesn't work, empirically so, and we should stop doing it.
Unfortunately, pushing diplomatic solutions hard would be political suicide in the US; the "us vs. them" mentality is strong here, and I don't think most Americans would be ok with what they'd see as giving in or giving up. And even if the politics at home could work, it's unclear if all that many on the other side are interested in a diplomatic solution, given how radicalized some of them have become due to our recklessness and hubris.
And the worst thing is: from a policy perspective (obviously not arguing about every single US citizen) that's really hard to argue with, given which countries the US has entered into armed conflicts with, which groups of people are most picked upon by politicians, etc.
But for every confict in which the USA is fighting one group of Muslims, it's doing so to protect or ally with another group of Muslims. The Afghan government are Muslims, the elected Iraqi government are Muslims, the victims of IS and the Taliban are overwhelmingly Muslims. Saudi Arabia, the west's biggest ally in the region is Muslim. We are allying with tens of millions of Muslims against groups consisting of thousands of Muslims. The west has far, far more Muslim allies than Muslim enemies.
I remember in the early days of our being in Afghanistan, there were a few media pieces reporting that they remembered the last time the British were there, 100 or 150 years ago. The tone was very much that it was somehow surprising the Afghans brought this up again.
Yet Britain and the US are built on national history, myths and memories. The US has a huge national story around independence and the push west into the frontier. The UK has our tales and myths of 1940 and 1066. Scots still remember "the 45" (that's 1745). Why wouldn't Afghanistan or Iraq?
Personally, my eyes were opened quite a while ago when the US dropped one of the largest conventional bombs on some mountain region in Afghanistan where they suspected Taliban leaders to hide out. The next day some guy on Reddit wrote (loosely paraphrased) "Hey, that's were I always travel with my motorbike! Glad I wasn't there when that bomb went down..." and posted a picture of where the bomb hit, with his motorbike in the foreground.
That said, since Irish independence there has been a good degree of desired closeness between the two countries, not least the passport free freedom of movement and voting, which survived the worst of the NI violence. Looking back that can seem surprising. Record numbers of Brits have been applying for Irish passports (a remarkably high number are eligible) since the Brexit vote.
isn't there though? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-49764305
And does it go the other way? Do you create violent anti-Islamists when Muslims commit terror attacks? Were the orphans of 9/11 more likely to sign up for the US military, or commit hate crimes against Muslims than their non-directly-affected peers?
Were the founding fathers terrorists? The British sure thought so...
You can be the gatekeeper of that word all you want, just know that you're playing that role.
This exact oratory slight of hand is used constantly in media, virtue signaling through word choice.
Calling indiscriminately killing civilians something as generic as "a bombing campaign" is like calling 9/11 "a training flight gone wrong".
> Do you create violent anti-Islamists when Muslims commit terror attacks?
Yes? E.g. after the murder of Lee Rigby in the UK there was a small wave of attempted arson on mosques.
It's so sad that you don't know this.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/nov/24/theobserver
>Full text: bin Laden's 'letter to America'
>As for the first question: Why are we fighting and opposing you? The answer is very simple:
>(1) Because you attacked us and continue to attack us.
Yes, of course it does. Hell, even on the recent 9/11 HN thread there were people who said they joined the military after the towers collapsed. It's only natural reaction when your nation gets attacked, and it works the same everywhere.
It's best to think of this as a single self-perpetuating process, with a strong feedback loop of hate and suffering inside. So the US bombs some Muslim countries, and eventually some group manages to pull off a 9/11 in retaliation. US reacts to this by utterly destroying several countries, and in reaction, ISIS is born. Which then US and others attempt to bomb out of existence. Rinse, lather, repeat. A kills B's people, B retaliates by killing A's people, A retaliates to retaliation by killing B's people, ...
Jihadists aren’t in a loop. That’s a myth. Jihad is real to them, and they are attacking non believers.
The stated motivation for the 9/11 attacks were the presence of U.S. airbases in Saudi Arabia. Not revenge for some past hurt or attack.
Why does everyone presume that what they say isn’t what they mean?
This is how religion is used to get people to do things. You can read anything you like from a religious book; you'll find justification for anything if you comb for quotes enough. This makes religion a glue, or an amplifier, not a prescriber of behavior.
Consider Christianity - the religion that gave us half of what's nice about the Western culture. That same religion using that same, unchanging book, set half of Europe aflame multiple times, for ostensibly religious reasons. When you look at it from outside it looks ridiculous, and when you study history you discover obvious political goals behind the crusades and other European wars - but then, a lot of people fighting and directing forces believed they do it because "God commands it".
It's no different with Islam. Jihad is just an excuse to get people to fight and die for political causes. If the political reasons disappear, they'll soon find an excuse to not fight, and Jihad will again become "the internal struggle".
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/nov/24/theobserver
Did you read your own source? Yes, there's more to it than what OP said, but it is true that this was a motivation.
Considering America has concentrated a large number of bombs on Afghanistan, why are they underrepresented in terrorist bombing of American targets? Why didn't the US see a spate of attacks from Cambodia in the 70s?
These are all great stories that have been talked about. But unless there is some kind of supporting evidence, these are still just stories.
1. Terrorists are people with legitimate grievances
2. Terrorists are representatives of oppressed people
3. Terrorists have genuine reasons for their actions
All of these things are false. People do not turn into international, careless murderers just because they experience travesty. Terrorists exploit this concept to try to give themselves legitimacy, but the reality is that it's highly removed from the actual reality of what's happening.
You know what does create terrorists though?
1. Sanctions and
2. Funding of militias.
These are things that everyone - except for isolationists - stand behind and support.
----
Thanks for the 5 downvotes in 10 minutes! Feel free to help me (someone from the region who was directly caught up in not one but two American wars) understand why I should be a terrorist now. I'll also forward the comments to my cousin who was working inside a Red Cross clinic hit by a US airstrike so she also knows what to think. Thanks in advance HN!
As opposed to your elected politicians and your military having blown up his daughter at her wedding, scattering her remains over a wide enough area that it is hard even finding anything to bury.
Makes sense.
The only way you're going to get someone mad enough for that, is if the militia you equipped happens to inflict similar cruelties, or you otherwise mess with his nation in a way that is more than just an inconvenience.
If the US imposed sanctions against my country, I'd just shrug. If the US killed my family members and I had no recourse...
Sanctions starve people to death, literally. There is a blockade on food, medicine and your entire life savings turn to nothing. Your life becomes rations. It has such a significant effect that this even turned the non-religious Arab nationalist socialist Ba'ath party into an extremist Islamist brigade in under a decade[0].
These sanctions are even one the major stated reason of the 9/11 attacks by Al Qaeda[1] - not that Saudis flying planes into the world trade center somehow represents the suffering of Iraqis.
I'm not even sure why this would be contested, I don't think you understand what sanctions are or what kind of almost-genocidal effects they have[2] but with your comment I'm suddenly understanding the reasoning of the people downvoting me and upvoting others.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faith_campaign
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motives_for_the_September_11_a...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctions_against_Iraq#Effects...
You obviously do not understand that sanctions are usually a way to prepare for war with weapons. Sanctions bring up the cracks in societies that are otherwise hidden under a thin layer of comfort we call civilized behavior. With sanctions you get a black market and all that is related to it. Sanctions are a trade war at another level.
Terrorism is a political tactic coming from a power asymmetry and is labeled as such due to this power dynamic as a consequence of who controls the narrative.
USA should better rush with million dollar offers to families, along with apologies, of course.
All three of your assertions are wrong, regardless. And you have no business judging 'appropriateness'. Of course there are criminals that take advantage of situations, I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that they are not the types that blow themselves up to make a quick buck.
The devil is always in the detail, but generally speaking terrorists are violent combatants who pursue certain political goals, but don't have a regular army, and at some point in their life unfortunately accepted the idea that it is legitimate to intentionally harm or kill civilians to reach those goals. Accepting this horrible idea is what makes them terrorists.
edit: added word 'Saudi'
Or maybe because one was a tactical op gone horribly wrong based on bad intel from the ground, and the other was a well planned and highly coordinated strategic op designed to destabilize international markets?
Um no, you are wrong.
_What USA does_ is terrorism. When you drop bombs on people out of nowhere, that's called terrorism. Sorry if you're an American but you've got some learning to do about the biggest terrorist organization in the world before calling others a terrorist. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRbnPA3fd5U
Then what does the IS represent to you? The good guys?
"A U.S. drone strike intended to hit an Islamic State (IS) hideout"
I urge you to take a closer look at U.S. drone strike programs and how effective they are. It's closer to 0 than it is to 100%. The U.S. takes no responsibility for its actions in the world stage, like ever. Have you even seen US held accountable for anything?
But that ain't gonna happen, ever.
Only if the motive for dropping those bombs is to advance a political/ideological agenda.
We need to be very clear that "terrorism" has a very specific meaning. It's not just a group or individual who terrorises.
Which of course, nobody does.
FWIW, you and I are likely from the same country.
If one objects to calling it terrorism because they're really trying to hit the combatants only, and objects to calling it a war crime because technically there's no war with an internationally recognized nation state, then how should we call it?
There needs to be a distinction between:
* attacking civilians (terrorism)
* attacking The System, but going for softer targets and not taking its military might directly head on (guerilla war)
* attacking The System, in a Military v Military setting (regular warfare)
While there are groups that will never have the direct strength to take a head on fight, I think it's beneficial to have a category showing that they limit their targets to agents of the system rather than any random civilian.
But also, the US should be held accountable for its actions.
The world as we know it, the progress in art, science, and humanities. The cures for polio, infant mortality and poverty dropping.
The website you are currently using to spread poison.
Those are all “_What USA does_”
Cut it out with this evil language.
Point being, the US does a lot of things. Some good, some bad. You don't get to trade the good things for the bad things. There could be progress in art, science and humanities without indiscriminate drone bombings of innocent civilians worldwide.
I was not aware that curing polio is a global absolution of sins.
Also USA has some of the highest infant mortality and poverty rates in the western world.
It’s so fashionable to hate America, that must make it true.
Why do you work for an American company then?
Hypocrisy. Absolute disgusting hypocrisy every time.
The role of America’s military in maintain a relatively peaceful world is unpopular, but has prevented a Third World War thus far.
Every decade there is less war and violent death than the one before, because of the use of United States military power. It’s true, and it’s so effective some people naively think it can be somehow done away with.
These people don’t live in the real world.
How much art was coming out of East Germany under the Soviet Union?
What other nation is deterring constant military expansion of China and Russia?
How many nations are confronting IS?
You are either naive or destructive.
In fact Russia consolidated its influence and alliances in the middle east just by exploiting American mistakes there.
Just leave. It would be a hugely popular move everywhere: among the left, the right, veterans, other countries, etc. So why not do it?
Let's be honest here, US is trying hard for last 15 years to be the most hated country anywhere, ever.
Millions of innocent civilians killed based on outright lies by US president in Iraq 2nd war (they were so glaringly obvious on UN meeting when GWB presented them that Germany and France outright rejected joining. UK couldn't care less). The consequences are felt across half of Asia and whole Europe till these days. Please tell me, what justice system in US does to a person who kills innocents without any reason? Nothing good. And if you kill millions? Good pension and CIA protection for rest of your life apparently. Plus Afghanistan, yet another battlefield where mighty US army is losing a battle with guys with AKs.
Another topic is online privacy, US could have been champion of freedom, and initially it was, but we had Snowden and stuff ain't better since then. That's plain amoral. Currently US can't claim much moral superiority over China for outsiders, like it or not.
I ain't even touching the topic of current US president because that would be for a separate thread.
To like US and its role in current politics these days requires super strong tint on ones pink glasses. Most of the world is kind of fed up and just wants to be left alone, not invaded for US version of 'freedom', oil, strategic place or whatever.
This is real world out there, where 95% of the mankind lives.
I think most americans fail to recognise how much propaganda they're constantly fed about how great the US are. From the outside it almost looks like a parody, especially since Trump is in the office. Example: https://www.vox.com/2014/6/16/5814270/the-successful-70-year...
The trouble with judging by actions is it makes everybody bad, including the judge! I suspect that's why people don't like it. Since nearly everyone believes their own intentions are good, judging by intentions preserves their own sense of goodness even if they contribute to a few killings by accident/negligence.
I actually think I'm right of center on this issue in general, I just wish we called it as it is.
If you keep punching me in the face while claiming it was your intention to punch someone else I'm going to come to the conclusion sooner rather than later that you're lying or stupid or incompetent – either way I'm going to do something about it rather than continue to let you punch me in the face.
Is it too much to ask that a lot more effort be expended in not mowing down innocent civilians while prosecuting the so-called global-war-on-terror?
It is well known that drone strikes are terribly inaccurate and therefore the risk for civilian casualties is high.
This is how the cycle of violence is perpetuated.
Better?
Which the war machine needs in order to grow.
Which the politicians need in order to get elected (Some people want "strong" leaders, for this definition of strong).
Hackernews should try and keep to tech and away from politics or its quality will continue to degrade. For instance the comments here are mostly not saying anything that hasn't already been said a thousand times before (is this just outrage porn?).
I would think the same, but then you’ve got things like project Maven which is very closely related to things like US drone strikes and which definitely deserves its place on HN. For example in this particular case, I’d be interested to know how the initial identification has been made from aerial views alone (I suppose they were based on aerial views) that those nut pickers were the bad guys (when in fact they weren’t): was it a manual recognition task? An automatic one? (i.e. image recognition).
Again, this pretty much looks like a false positive issue with great “chances” of having been caused by an automatic process, so it definitely has its place on HN.
Technology has consequences that are ethical issues because it has influence on the lives of real people.
If you create a technology that is used to abuse other people(like facebook spying or manipulating masses or the military invading other countries), you are responsible for it.
The quality of HN improves if the human side of technology and science is openly discussed.
If a drone kills 30 people it is not "porn". It is a very serious matter.
Would you call it outrage porn if those 30 people were from your family?
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-afghanistan-attack-drones...
The Taliban were all too coward to plant a car bomb in the proximity of the government intelligence department building, so what they did was to plant it next to a nearby hospital.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/09/killed-car-bomb-attac...
Yankee go home.
FTFY
Or maybe like the non lethal terminator in Terminator 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3XJxWwYx58
Most likely they went home, slept soundly, thinking it was a good day, god and country, etc.
I have watched Restrepo on Netflix and found one thing interesting, that biggest thing soldiers have missed in their civilian lives is the adrenaline/joy rush of a shoot-out, no matter how dangerous it is. Paradoxically most of the interviewees are clearly suffering from some levels of PTSD, because probably you cannot be trained for when you see your friend's body/face to be blown apart.
It would be interesting to hear from someone in the military or someone with military psychology training knowledge, how this works. Seems that soldiers are fine with killing "the enemy", but seeing death of your friends gives you (understandably) PTSD.
> but military training is mostly about obeying orders
Not at all. The military wants individuals to think for themselves. Strictly obeying orders would never get the job done. In fact, the large majority of military training is industrial/trade depending on the branch. When people see bootcamp, and orders being thrown around that's less of learning to obey and more of making people into a cohesive team (breakdown, then buildup). Think about how tight a startup team is after going through hell to get a product launched. Very similar but even tighter.
> that biggest thing soldiers have missed in their civilian lives is the adrenaline/joy rush of a shoot-out, no matter how dangerous it is
A very small percentage of the military ever gets in a firefight, again depending on branch. Of course there is an adrenaline rush that comes out of being in danger (just shooting guns in general is a rush). Every time I paddle out into big surf or when I have sky dived, the chance I may die is part of the 'fun'. I've never been in a shoot-out, but from what I've read it's those experiences X 100 or more. Finally, these are the exact type of people we want fighting. The best way to survive and win is to go all in 100%. When someone is there, on the ground being shot at, the time for them to debate is over.
> Seems that soldiers are fine with killing "the enemy"
Keep in mind that the US has strict rules of engagement (mistakes are sometimes made as reports have shown). By the time a soldier is killing the enemy they are also going to be receiving fire. Effectively if they do not kill this person, this person will kill them. Seeing friends die is obviously hard because they are your friends, and because of the way teams are built people end up very close.
With all that said, the military is the execution arm of politicians. A soldier on the ground has about as much power to decide to be in or out of war as you or I. People join for a lot of reasons. Financial is a common one. But, a lot of people also join out of a duty and a draw to be of service to a country they love regardless of who is POTUS at any given time.
I think this is what concerns people so much about the drone strikes. Clearly drone strikes are one sided fire fights. And even by the government's own statistics their signal to noise kill ratio is abysmal. This is categorically different than a soldier on the ground returning fire even if we might disagree with the soldier having been sent there in the first place.
This is not a new problem though. Cruise missiles did this for years before drones. Drones are just more prolific now, and we are more likely to see the aftermath.
It’s as bleak and distressing as you can imagine. Here’s a couple to get you started:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/18/life-as-a-dron...
https://dronecenter.bard.edu/burdens-war-crews-drone-aircraf...
Even being in a conventional aircraft you are largely removed from the situation because you are thousands (or tens of thousands) of feet above your target and any individual is an unrecognizable speck that your weapon system strikes after you're already well past your target.
This is a problem, for society, with modern warfare. You can sit a mile away and 'paint' a target with IR for someone else to fire a missile with, or you can call in on your radio coordinates and have artillery take out your target from even farther away, or you can effectively emulate a video game and drop a bomb on a few pixels in Afghanistan while sitting in an air conditioned trailer in Nevada. You can wage war without ever having to see the face of the enemy, you strip the enemy of their humanity making it easier to kill.
I imagine some drone operators struggle with severe depression but I imagine it's generally less than an infantrymen that was in CQB firefights in Ramadi or Fallujah or a trench in WWI.
Modern warfare allows us to be cold and calculating, it allows us to pause our humanity. It's good for a military but it's bad for civilization.
I found the movie fun, I think I watched it three times over the last couple years.
Here's the relevant U.S. quote, "U.S. forces conducted a drone strike..." the subject is clear and there is no equivocating about who was responsible for the drone strike.
> In 2014, former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden said in a public debate, “We kill people based on metadata.”
> According to multiple reports and leaks, death-by-metadata could be triggered, without even knowing the target’s name, if too many derogatory checks appear on their profile. “Armed military aged males” exhibiting suspicious behavior in the wrong place can become targets, as can someone “seen to be giving out orders.” Such mathematics-based assassinations have come to be known as “signature strikes.”
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/how-...
Fair enough, but I would not read too much into that choice of words. For example:
“The workers had lit a bonfire and were sitting together when a drone targeted them,” tribal elder Malik Rahat Gul told Reuters by telephone from Wazir Tangi.
I don't believe that Malik Rahat Gul (or possibly, his translator) was attempting to relieve anyone of moral agency or responsibility, do you?
“The workers had lit a bonfire and were sitting together when a drone targeted them,” tribal elder Malik Rahat Gul told Reuters by telephone from Wazir Tangi.
“The workers had lit a bonfire and were sitting together when a drone pilot targeted them,” tribal elder Malik Rahat Gul told Reuters by telephone from Wazir Tangi.
Small change, large impact on the takeaway.
I think the person I was responding to was implying that the wording was chosen to downplay what had been done. I don't think that is likely, given the identity of the only person quoted in the article to use that choice of words.
> Small change, large impact on the takeaway.
Meh.
The Mongols tried and failed.
The Arabs tried and failed.
The Mughals tried and failed.
The British tried and failed.
The Soviets tried and failed.
NATO tried and......
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasions_of_Afghanistan
And please journalists, stop referring to the people as "tribal this" or "tribal that". To always focus on that point is unnecessary and disrespective. A father is a father in any part of the world.