It’s a deeply cynical article in multiple. For one thing, Malala has a voice all her own, and she has made that voice make a difference in the world, and for that reason — for education, for equality, for freedom, for peace — she has gotten the ears of the truthfully free world.
Nabila Rehman is indeed a victim of the “war on terror” — which like the one on drugs is also a conflict involving people, many of whom either are or start out innocents. The level of effort, from Pakistani military runs with tanks (how come there seems to have been not much interest in the last sweep through the frontier?) to drone to shootouts to handcuffs and jails — responds to the character of challenge and resistance in the field: get the field down to where military or police may make arrests and more people live.
That civil or governed field isn’t there yet, and the drones correspond to keeping boots, not only American, off the ground, and the violence (compared to that which goes before a marching army) as low as that technology allows.
Now addressed: how did grandmother or family get on a target list in the first place?
It’s not easily done.
Somebody has to be noticed first.
As with Hamas in Gaza and elsewhere throughout the Islamic Small Wars, civilians get used badly, not only killed and maimed in the crossfire. Unlike computers and phones, minds may hold plans or signals that cannot be hacked (courier service). Homes and adjacent property may shelter tunnels, weapons depot, operations centers, etc. The God Mob may twist arms to get innocents in front of their evil doing, but that’s part of the hell that creates refugees — and damaged-for-life children.
I do commentary, not war planning or anything approaching “field operations” but as a writer, one wants to fill in the blanks: how did the target become a target? I would want to know that much before reviewing the dismal facts (“on the ground”) flowing down from that decision.
Inspiration:
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/11/malala-nabila-worlds-apart-201311193857549913.html – 11/1/2013.
The year-old Al Jazeera story was played against Malala’s recent Nobel Prize.
As there are people who believe that America (or the Jews, often enough) control and manipulate the world, there are writers who skinny on up that tree when the truth is there’s a lot of plain bad behavior, chaos, and danger out in the wild. If the “Islamic Small Wars” (from Afghanistan to Yemen) could be solved with detectives, poets, and detachments of military and paramilitary polices, they would be handled just that way, and the drone bombings (which frequency has diminished) would diminish with reductions in terrorist attacks on persons and populations.
I have no apparent idea as to how a specific grandmother, family member, or home or home site gets on a target list, but it doesn’t happen with an “oops” by the hand of fate: somebody saw something, said something, investigated something — and the results are awful but much the same (but less) than market and mosque bombings and raids against military and police barracks. Somehow, in the creation of anti-west opinion, a lot of information goes missing.
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