Article: A Flood of Drone Strikes by Tom Engelhardt -- Antiwar.com

A Flood of Drone Strikes by Tom Engelhardt -- Antiwar.com
http://original.antiwar.com/engelhardt/2010/12/09/a-flood-of-drone-strikes/

Think of it this way: this summer, monsoon rains and floods submerged one-fifth of Pakistan, affecting 20 million people.  It was the country’s worst natural disaster in its history. Although the body count, under the circumstances, was considered comparatively low — 2,000 killed — the United Nations concluded that the destruction caused by the floods surpassed the devastating Asian tsunami of 2004, the Pakistan earthquake of 2005, and the recent earthquake in Haiti combined. Two million homes were destroyed and the crucial food belt in the key agricultural provinces of Punjab and Sindh was ravaged.  Millions of children were left homeless or at risk of contracting cholera, dysentery, and other water-borne diseases. According to the World Heath Organization, 1.5 million potentially fatal cases of diarrhea and another two million cases of malaria are still expected.

During what U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon termed the worst disaster he’d ever seen, with the country desperate and prostrate, the CIA launched its most extensive drone campaign yet. Over the 30 days of September, as Islamabad rushed to assure Washington that it would not divert too many troops from the war effort to help with flood relief, 20-odd drone strikes were called in. They would produce the highest number of drone fatalities for a single month in the last six years.

In 2009, in one of the many State Department cables Wikileaks loosed on the world, U.S. Ambassador Anne Paterson confirmed that key player and Chief of Army Staff General Ashfaq Kayani directed his forces to aid those American drone strikes.  Various U.S. operations in the country’s northern and tribal regions were, the ambassador wrote, “almost certainly [conducted] with the personal consent of… General Kayani.” 

The Pakistani media has welcomed the release of the State Department documents because much that reporters and pundits have long claimed (and which Washington has long denied) has now been confirmed: that, for instance, the mercenary private contractor Blackwater (now known as Xe Services) has been operating in Pakistan at the behest of the Americans, that the country’s military high command has given the green light for drone strikes on its own people, and that the infamously corrupt government of President Zardari has turned the country over to the Americans in exchange for money. 

(via Instapaper)

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