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About this blog Chip's blogA blog for my international politics classes |
Monday, November 1, 2010
The US is pursuing an RMA-like strategy of robotic warfare, relying on unmanned drones, in Pakistan:
Imagine if, an hour from now, a robot-plane swooped over your house and blasted it to pieces. The plane has no pilot. It is controlled with a joystick from 7,000 miles away, sent by the Pakistani military to kill you. It blows up all the houses in your street, and so barbecues your family and your neighbours until there is nothing left to bury but a few charred slops. Why? They refuse to comment. They don't even admit the robot-planes belong to them. But they tell the Pakistani newspapers back home it is because one of you was planning to attack Pakistan. How do they know? Somebody told them. Who? You don't know, and there are no appeals against the robot.
Now imagine it doesn't end there: these attacks are happening every week somewhere in your country. They blow up funerals and family dinners and children. The number of robot-planes in the sky is increasing every week. You discover they are named "Predators", or "Reapers" – after the Grim Reaper. No matter how much you plead, no matter how much you make it clear you are a peaceful civilian getting on with your life, it won't stop. What do you do? If there was a group arguing that Pakistan was an evil nation that deserved to be violently attacked, would you now start to listen?
In fact, this is what is happening, and it's one of the factors behind the rise in anti-US sentiment and violence. "Even the 2004 report commissioned by Donald Rumsfeld said that 'American direct intervention in the Muslim world' was the primary reason for jihadism."
For more details, see Johann Hari's article "Obama's robot wars endanger us all" in The Independent (UK)

