"I am less concerned with how many civilians we are actually killing and more concerned with how many civilians the neutral population thinks we are killing.The above quotable quote helped framework work on the meme that -yes -
Drones Gone Wild! are awesome;
yes, Drones Gone Wild! are ripping the living guts out of al Qaeda in those magical PAK Army proof 'no go zones' and
yes, Drones Gone Wild! may in fact be resulting in the recent spike of 3 Stooges style ops since all Great Satan's smart enemies are getting sold out and taken out - all the way out.
And yet, alas! - Drones Gone Wild! are churning out more terrorists and creating a super savvy indestructible terrorist recruiting drive in Land of the Pure that will enrage and encourage normal secular fence sitting Pakistanis into sworn blood enemies.
Like a jagdpanzer driven by a crew of das crunken coeds corps (whiskey and beer - never fear!!), the phat facts have totally trashed that sad, played inappropriate handwringing in a Sickleschnitt style romping blitz of risible proportions.
Pew's brand new Global Attitude Check for Land of the Pure shares that Pakistanis wouldn't know Drones Gone Wild if it landed in their front lawn. They don't know and Don't. Care.
“Just over one-in-three Pakistanis (35 percent) have heard about the drone strikes.” Apparently, Pakistanis barely know this program even exists. Another 43 percent say they’ve heard “nothing at all” about the drones. You can hear the champagne corks popping at Langley and GrEaT sAtAn"s gIrLfRiEnD."
Pic "These aren't the Drones you're looking for"
as always, the question remains, what civilians?
ReplyDeletethey always seem interchangeable with the terrorists.
Das crunk!!
ReplyDeleteYoung Woman, you look absolutely stunning in that armor.
ReplyDelete===
If the drones with their handfuls of collateral damage casualties (Hellfire missiles have a 20lb warhead) are causing the Pakistani civilians to get uppity, then what are the Talib/al-Q suicide truck bombs with their hundreds of intentional civilian casualties causing? Mild indigestion? Heartburn? Constipation? All of the above?
Maybe that whole meme about we're making more terrorists by killing terrorists is just crap. Killing Waffen SS by the tens of thousands in the Falaise Pocket didn't create more Waffen SS, all it did was kill tens of thousands of freaked out genocidal Germans, and shorten the war by at least a year or more.
NEXT
STOP
KARACHI,
R
I thought about this a bit before I chimed in and decided it merited doing.
ReplyDeleteIt's a matter of your end goals, and I realize you like brute force and to be simplistic about things...Make EVERYTHING BLACK AND WHITE.
That isn't how fighting insurgencies works.
You Ever STUDY Ron Reid-Daly?
He commanded Selous Scouts.
Sometimes when they were compromised, they would go ahead and make contact and call in FIREFORCE, but if they didn't have to they didn't. Intel is useful too.
They were probably the most successful counter-insurgents in the history of COIN-WAR. Scouts were so good, they'd often take prisoners who claimed to have been in a dozen fights with them and they'd only been in two or three, because they so infiltrated the enemy that the enemy were often getting in fights with themselves. You cal look it up.
It was always a dance between using force and laying out. They had Radios and an Air Force behind them, BUT, trading spending time and soldiers scouting and gaining intelligence for a couple dozen enemy dead, when you could hold out and get 500 of them instead of 20...
YOU MIGHT COULD DO THE MATH ON THAT.
Sometimes a bit of decorum is useful and they probably "turned" more terrorists and had better intel than any SPECOPS EVER on the PLANET. One small regiment was responsible for 68% of the terrorist casualties in the Bush War, because, they didn't always go charging around like a Bull in a china shop like the SAS did in Kenya, for example.
If you force everybody to "the ground" they will get harder and harder to find. It's a double edged sword, and there's people that are NOT worth wasting a hellfire on, purely because they are nobody people, not even counting the propoganda/hearts and minds loss.
Scouts used to call in air strikes on THEIR OWN CAMPS (conveniently not being there when the strikes happened) to win the ability to collect intel and wage war better in the long run.
Only reason Rhodesia was lost was moronic non-Africans that couldn't understand what Mugabe was going to do to the country. The Scouts kicked the sh*t out of the bastard's forces on the way out with an embargo against them, because they sometimes knew how to be DISCREET.
In the long run, taking down an army is more inportant than killing a couple dozen people with missiles, and doing it in a fashion that seems capricious both on the world stage, and to the people you are trying to win to your side where you are fighting.
Drones have a place but they ARE EMPHATICALLY NOT the only game in town.
I went to school with kids that were refugees of the Shah that spoke Farsi and Arabic. Some of them joined the military. Some of them have probably accounted for more actual terrorists than all drone strikes added up.
Gotta be careful about being the person with only one hammer and thinking everything is a nail. Some things are NOT NAILS.
Digest this, hell you can make fun of me. I have seriously thick skin. But I think you are looking at this is a very simplistic fashion when it isn't.
Take care and remember
BRUTE FORCE is only ONE OPTION OF MANY and it IS NOT ALWAYS APPROPRIATE TO YOUR LONG TERM WARFIGHTING GOALS.
The toolbox we have is large and this battle is going to be a LONG ONE.