Droning On on the Af-Pak Frontier

A vitally important and thoroughly documented new report on the impact of Obama's drone campaign has just been released by researchers at NYU School of Law and Stanford University Law School. Entitled "Living Under Drones: Death, Injury and Trauma to Civilians From US Drone Practices in Pakistan", the report details the terrorizing effects of Obama's drone assaults as well as the numerous, highly misleading public statements from administration officials about that campaign. The study's purpose was to conduct an "independent investigations into whether, and to what extent, drone strikes in Pakistan conformed to international law and caused harm and/or injury to civilians".

Reports Glenn Greenwald today,

The fact is that the Drone Attacks are simply not going to destroy the Taliban. If anything, the evidence is that, even in Afghanistan, the attempt to use aerial force to defeat enemies simply ends up hitting the civilian population and creating more recruits.

The Afghanistan War is not winnable and is being fought so ferociously in order to facilitate US geopolitical interests in Central Asia: a very important part of this is the construction of the TAPI pipeline which will, as the middle two letters of the acronym make clear, will go through Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The Drone Casualties are a price Washington thinks is worth it. Business as usual. And the business of war across "Af-Pak" is clearly the TAPI Pipeline, something both evident from what leading figures in Washington have said ( though never Obama himself ) and from numerous strategic studies.