Your Place in the New World

The question of who is the primary fighter against international terrorism might seem naive to a person who believes that President Obama speaks the truth in his speeches. Judging by the declarations that the Washington administration regularly excretes from its bowels, there is no force in the world capable of confronting terror like the United States.

And basically it’s true. If the White House would stop financing and arming terrorists the world over, international political life would become as peaceful as a retirement home.

Let’s look at the facts.

We are not going to speak about students who come to school to shoot as many of their classmates as possible. We will speak specifically about international terrorism. If the presidents of powerful countries speak about it, that means it exists, doesn’t it?

If it is specifically international, it follows that coordination exists among terrorist groups in different countries. Right? Coordination is control. Who controls the international terrorist network? The one who finances it, arms it and, most importantly, shields it politically.

Declarations are one thing; reality is another. The communists once proclaimed as their objective the liberation of the working class from exploitation and built a huge number of labor camps. President Obama declared the “war on terror” as one of the main objectives of his administration, yet the well-known American political scientist, Professor Noam Chomsky, for some reason thinks that Obama should be tried for the outbreak of the war. What is going on?

At issue is the use of unmanned aerial vehicles. Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham claims that in Yemen, Pakistan and other countries, the Americans have killed nearly 5,000 people using these devices. No one issued an arrest warrant, no one made an inquiry and there was no trial for the victims of the drones. They were simply killed at the command of UAV operators and U.S. military authorities.

Yes, it is war, but the terrorists are criminals. Tomorrow, Obama will declare a war on crime, then everyone will find out just what kind of force the law has.

It is possible that terrorists really were among those killed, but the fact is that among them were many people not involved in any kind of illegal activity whatsoever. Sen. Graham argues that this is war, but if that is the case, then soldiers and commanders make the decisions.

However, it should be noted that there is a category of crimes known as war crimes; the killing of innocent civilians falls into that category.

Yet another question: What does Pakistan have to do with it? The answer is simple: The same thing as Afghanistan, on whose soil practically all the world’s heroin is produced. It is a question of the fight for control over drug trafficking.

Before the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, control over the production of opium and heroin was in the hands of the Taliban. Then suddenly, the Taliban, for some reason — maybe they could not agree on the price? — decided to halt production of the narcotics, the U.S. Army invaded Afghanistan, production of the herbs was restored and the Taliban ended up being forced to move their bases to Pakistan.

Acting from these Pakistani bases, they have repeatedly tried to disrupt the American expeditionary force’s supplies and generally mess things up, as best they could. The Taliban have means — not insignificant means, it seems.

Pakistan as a state and its establishment are staunch allies of Washington, and Washington is most lenient on terrorism if it suits its interests. Have the fellows from the White House ever condemned Chechen militants or demanded the removal of terrorist bases from Georgian territory? Of course not.

The problem is that the Pakistani military has had no success in crushing the Taliban on its soil. What can you do? It tries, it carries out some operations, but none of them have any significant effect.

The U.S. could send yet another expeditionary force to Pakistan, end up with a second Vietnam, a stream of caskets back to the fatherland and take military spending to cosmic heights — all the more as it is printing dollars in unlimited quantities. All this is too high a price for victory over a people whose annual salary is barely above that of a medieval landsknecht.

The American military command decided to actively use UAVs; who in the world cares about the fate of poor Pakistani peasants who are accidentally caught under missile attack? First of all, this is not a war on terror. It is a quarrel between two mafia groups, and the command center of one of them is located in Washington. Second, this is terror all right — that is to say, violence intended to intimidate. Drone operations have no military significance whatsoever.

What is the effectiveness of the UAV terror?

As Reuters notes, the issue remains one of the most sensitive in relations between Islamabad and Washington. The U.S. is actively using military UAVs for strikes on suspected militants, but sometimes, innocent civilians and — what an embarrassment! — Pakistani army soldiers wind up under fire. We can assume that the latter circumstance is quite amusing to the Taliban.

Meanwhile, what is most alarming in this whole story is not the U.S. violation of Pakistan’s national sovereignty and shameless trampling of its citizens’ rights — we can apply all this to any militarily weak state — but something else.

A majority of people in our world continues to measure the degree of totalitarianism by the number of guards in the concentration camp towers. Here, right before us, is a model for a new societal device that is being tested — so far — in less developed countries.

It turns out that in recent years, using the commotion of the “war on terror” to its advantage, the U.S. government has created an entire army of robocops. Yes, these devices are still not operating efficiently enough: They indiscriminately shoot at everything that moves and they are not able to independently recognize human facial expressions. Correcting the defects of the prototypes has always been a matter of time.

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To top it all off, it became clear, not so long ago, that the American National Security Agency is already tracking every person with a cell phone, television, computer, right down to a washing machine. We won’t mention satellite navigation systems. They provide great opportunities.

I wonder: Do U.S. citizens think that in their country, the use of drone-robocops is impossible because they live in a democratic society ostensibly run by an African-American president who smoked — slander, of course — marijuana in his youth? Does it not bother anyone that until recently in the Southern states, the Ku Klux Klan hung African-Americans in trees?

If you abolish any kind of rule of law for Pakistanis, then you abolish it for yourself. At first, there will be talk of challenges, then of threats, then of the defense of democracy, then survival, after which drones will patrol city streets.

That is your place in the new world.