"Besides these militants, a large number of innocent civilians also became victims of the drone strikes aimed at militants. They raised their voice in protest but most of the times it is all in vain." [20]
In addition to local protests, last month demonstrations were held in Pakistan's capital of Islamabad against the bloody and cowardly targeted murders in the tribal areas. 10,000 people demonstrated in Peshawar at the beginning of this week demanding a halt to the attacks.
To demonstrate how much the U.S. is concerned about the outrage of Pakistanis over the missile strikes, and the victims of the same, over the last four weeks the CIA:
Fired a missile at vehicles near the town of Ghulam Khan in North Waziristan on December 31, killing eight people.
Killed 19 in three missile attacks in the same region on the first of the year.
On January 7 slew four more people in North Waziristan.
Five days afterward killed six in four missile strikes.
On January 18 killed at least five more people in North Waziristan in an attack on "a house suspected of housing militants." [21]
On January 23 launched three drone strikes that killed 13 people in North Waziristan. The targets included a house, a motor vehicle and two people on a motorcycle.
With 62 killed in 24 days, the U.S. is on schedule to slay another 1,000 Pakistanis this year as well in what the State Department's Harold Koh calls targeted killings as opposed to targeted assassinations. The use of the last term, but not its practice, is frowned upon by U.S. law.
....
With the passing of several resolutions on Afghanistan since September 2001 condemning terrorism but not war, the United Nations Security Council has been complicit in the expansion of a war that now costs the lives of 10,000 Afghans a year and almost three Pakistanis a day. One that includes 1,000 U.S. and NATO air sorties (bombings, missile attacks and strafing) a month in Afghanistan and on average over twice weekly lethal missile strikes in Pakistan.
Opposition to a war that, counting by days, is in its tenth year and by the calendar its eleventh is virtually non-existent on the official level. The number of the 192 UN member states that have in any manner opposed the Afghanistan-Pakistan war can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
When the Soviet Union intervened in Afghanistan in late 1979 (with the support of both factions of the ruling People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan) the U.S. rallied other nations - in the General Assembly and not the Security Council - to condemn the action. A resolution demanding the "immediate, unconditional and total withdrawal of the foreign troops from Afghanistan" passed by a vote of 104-18 only 18 days after the first Soviet troops arrived in the country. According to major Western political and military officials, U.S. and NATO troops will remain in Afghanistan at least 15 years after the 2001 invasion.
The U.S.-backed mujahideen in Afghanistan and Northwest Pakistan posed a far greater potential threat to the Soviet Union, which bordered Afghanistan, than the Taliban could even theoretically present to the U.S., Canada and their European NATO partners.
Even the most steadfast supporter of the current war cannot with a straight face claim that over 150,000 foreign troops are in Central and South Asia to "hunt Osama bin Laden" and to "combat al-Qaeda." Not after ten years, surely. (Though Obama in his State of the Union address persisted in asserting "al Qaeda and their affiliates continue to plan attacks against us.")
The world stands indicted - and convicted - for not so much tolerating as actively supporting a war of unconscionable length with wildly disproportionate use of force by most of the world's major military powers (three of them nuclear nations). For accepting the concept of indefinite, in practical terms permanent, war as a natural state of affairs in the 21st century as the exclusive prerogative of the world's self-proclaimed sole military superpower and its phalanx of fellow NATO members.
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