Last night, US drones attacked the Pakistani town of Hangu, destroying a religious school and killing eight people, including three teachers and five students.
The Pakistani Foreign Ministry condemned the attack, which came just hours after the US promised no drone strokes for the duration of Pakistan’s peace talks with the Taliban.
They reneged on that promise, and now the Obama Administration is trying to redefine the reality on the ground, insisting that he religious school they destroyed wasn’t technically a religious school, but rather was a “terrorist compound” and that as far as they know, none of the slain were civilians.
Pakistani militant leader Sirajuddin Haqqani was rumored to have visited the school two days prior to the attack, but was long gone by the time the US destroyed it. The visit appears a rather flimsy pretext for declaring an entire school to be a “terrorist compound,” but that seems to be the Obama Administration’s go-to argument amid the looming Pakistani backlash.
When juggling chainsaws, one should take great care regarding the number being juggled. The US is losing control of all the little "situations" they've undertaken around the world. So many that all it will take is one faux pas and the entire daisy-chain will come unraveled – and from there a quick escalation to a place the world will require decades to recover from. All it is going to take is one of the players to finally take a real, principled stand against the US hegemony.
I suppose that makes the pre-9/11 flight school that trained what's-his-name a 'terrorist compound' as well and makes the owner and the staff all potential domestic drone targets, right? And for all those home-grown domestic terrorists who actually have jobs and all that, i suppose that makes their places of work 'terrorist havens' and their employers guilty of providing material support to terrorists. It's all reductio ad absurdium, but when you're playing this game do you really want to go down that particular rabbit hole? Remember, if we can do it, *they* can do it too and declare all sorts of things about us that we claim about them- but of course, we're exceptional and above all that. Well, aren't we?