Drones and left-wing politics in Pakistan by Adaner Usmani

an excellent analysis of the illegality, immorality, ineffectiveness and secrecy surrounding the drone program. a must read for all well-meaning pakistanis who think that the war on terror is *their* war.

Even as Obama has abandoned some of the language of the War on Terror, he has refused to dispense with its core legal foundation (what Alston refers to as the ’law of 9/11’). The US continues to assert a right to self-defense based on the wholly spurious justifications made famous under Bush: that the war is borderless, and that the groups with whom the USA is in armed conflict are ’undefined and open-ended’. As Alston rightly notes, “this interpretation of the right to self-defense is so malleable and expansive that it threatens to destroy the prohibition on the use of armed force contained in the United Nations Charter.”

Farhat Taj and her yammering allies share none of these legal or ethical qualms. Taj’s defense of the program, in fact, unabashedly reverses elementary legal principles: absent “verifiable evidence of civilian ’casualties’,” she has argued, drone victims can be declared terrorists. [4] Given that she means this to be the serious, reasoned argument of a ‘civilized’ public intellectual, the barbarity of the logic merits explication: the outrageous supposition, here, is that the program’s victims are militants (guilty) until proven civilian (innocent)! Taj is content, moreover, to root this argument in her faith in the CIA. Given that this is the intelligence wing of a State apparatus that is dripping in the blood of civilians, past and present, I hope I can be forgiven for suggesting that the Pakistani Left knows better.

Farhat Taj is fond of noting that there is, today, a happy coincidence between her goals and the goals of the American Empire. The criminal naievete and willful neglect of history that this argument exemplifies reminds me of the fate of the Iraqi ex-leftist, Kanan Makiya. Makiya, too, hoped to ride American bombs into an Iraq free of tyranny and oppression; before long, of course, he woke to find his country irreparably ravaged by the subsequent imperial onslaught.

More here.