Source: Al-Zawahiri not among 18 killed in airstrike
The drone, the CIA and a botched attempt to kill bin Laden’s deputy
The missiles were deadly accurate. In the pitch dark of a night in Pakistan’s sparsely populated North West Frontier Province, they not only located the three targeted houses on the outskirts of the village of Damadola Burkanday but squarely struck their hujra, the large rooms traditionally used by Pashtun tribesmen to accommodate guests…. the results of the strike were very clear: three ruined houses, mud-brick rubble scattered across the steeply terraced fields, the bodies of livestock lying where thrown by the airblast, a row of newly dug graves in the village cemetery and torn green and red embroidered blankets flapping in the chilly wind. Four children were among the 18 villagers who died in the brutally sudden attack on their homes.
Oops….
It was the sort of bold stroke that, had it worked, would have been hailed as a stroke of genius. The problem, though, is that there’s no margin for error when you attack a village and the “collateral damage” includes innocent civilians. If al-Zawahiri, and whomever else might have been among the intended targets were not killed in this attack, and if they were indeed not even present in the village at the time of the attack…well now; we just look like a bunch of indiscriminate murderers, don’t we? And who could reasonably argue with that assessment?
The problem with Our Glorious Leader’s endless war on terror is that this sort of thing keeps happening. Whether it’s flawed intelligence, poor execution, or simply a failed policy by a miserable failure of a President, it seems that we leave a trail of dead bodies wherever the war on terror takes us. Very seldom have any of these dead bodies been those of actual, honest-to-God terrorists. Too often, they’re women and children- innocent people just going about their daily lives, trying to get by as best they can. Then the power of American foreign policy drops in and wipes them off the map…because we THINK one of the “evildoers” MAY be present.
I’m not going to argue with the concept of killing those who would indiscriminately kill Americans, but can you understand why our seemingly indiscriminate killing of innocent civilians can leave people wondering who the real terrorists are? Or do we honestly feel that any “collateral damage” is a justifiable “cost of doing business” if we are to win the war on terror?
If we’re not careful, we may end up winning the war on terror while we lose the battle for the hearts and minds of those who have more reason to hate us than love us. The problem is that Our Glorious Leader really doesn’t seem to care about the unrelated costs of his war against terror. The dead are not “collateral damage”; they’re men, women, and children who did not deserve to be indiscriminately murdered by an American President trying to cover his tracks. They deserved better.
