Hearts, Minds and Robots
We know a great deal, and think a great deal about the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Whatever you might think about the wisdom and efficacy of these large-scale military occupations, the implications and consequences of them are broadly and regularly discussed. But there is a third conflict, one that gets reported regularly, but without details, context or critical analysis - the American war in Pakistan.
We have, somehow, created and defined a "robot exception" as a justification for these deadly actions. We seem to believe that there is some kind of rule that says if you use unmanned, remote-controlled aircraft to bomb homes, cars and villages in Pakistan you are exempt from responsibility, or even any requirement to honor the sovereignty of an ally.
Credible reports indicate that in the last year, out of hundreds of Pakistanis killed in unmanned airstrikes, a total of 14 of them were al Quaeda operatives. Indeed, Pakistani intelligence estimates that these remote-controlled attacks have a success rate of six percent. The rest either miss the targets or target the wrong people, typically due to faulty, or worse, purposely misleading intelligence. It seems that our air war on Western Pakistan is most effective in it's support of warlords, drug traffickers andal Quaeda operators themselves who supply fake intelligence in order to goad the United States into attacking their enemies instead of our own.
This, of course, is something you are particularly vulnerable to if you don't have actual troops in the country where you're fighting. You lack much of the ability you might otherwise have to vet and verify the intel you get from the field, and you have human decision-makers in the loop to prevent accidents and manipulation. America's unwillingness to either fight the war or stop the attacks leaves us in an untenable position. Our robotic air attacks are counterproductive on every level - they increase anti-American sentiment among the Tribal populations, they contribute to Taliban and al Quaeda recruitment while they supply our enemies with access to an air force they otherwise wouldn't have. So we have to ask: Why does Obama continue to launch these strikes?
It at least must be considered that he knows something we don't. Perhaps these attacks are truly providing an effective counter to genuine al Quaeda operations, to the extent that the net outcomes are beneficial even in light of the counterproductive fallout from them. Certainly there is no evidence of that, and there are strong reasons to believe that even with good intelligence about an actual operation, drone attacks are more likely to miss or fail than any other method we could use to disrupt that operation. The conclusion I come to is Obama's reasons are simpler, and more craven. There would be some political exposure created if he ended these attacks, especially in light of his statements that Pakistan is the key battle in this fight. The political pressure would not be that great, but as long as there is no political pressure to end the Predator attacks, he keeps his strong, activist national security credibility without significant downside.
This robotic air war in Pakistan is killing hundreds, ruining thousands of lives and turning wide swaths of the Pakistani Tribal population into our enemies. It is wrong, inhuman, nothing but the robotic mass murder of proud, poor rural people who have no defense against it. If you were sickened and saddened by the depths that Bush and Cheney sunk to in order to drive their modern imperial agenda, at least we knew well they were barbarians, and their actions, no matter how brutal and authoritarian fell into a spectrum we expected of them. There is something sadder, and more shameful, that a man like Barack Obama continues those murderous policies for political expediency's sake.
Looking Forward to Prosecutions
President Obama keeps saying he prefers to "look forward rather than backward" whenever he is asked about the possibility of investigating and prosecuting the architects of the Bush/Cheney administration's torture policies. As clearly brilliant as he is, does he actually not realize that doesn't make the slightest bit of sense? Does he understand that investigating violations of US and International law in no way prevents him and his administration from "looking forward"?
This very construction is odd, forced and awkward. You never hear any one say "I prefer looking forward rather than backward" when it comes to prosecuting fraud, corruption, larceny or even bank robbery or murder. That's because there is no way that investigating and prosecuting crimes is accurately described as "looking backwards", and in fact have nothing whatsoever to do with whatever direction you choose to look. We have laws. Enforcing them is something we do. We have government policies and agendas. Setting and pursuing them is another thing we do. No one has ever seriously made the case that one interferes with another.
"Looking forward rather than backward" sounds to me like nothing so much as "fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them over here". Clever, facile and utterly nonsensical. Repeat it enough and it will become accepted, received wisdom, inarguable and irrefutable. Marketing 101. And it very often seems to be an effective tactic - but only as long as critical voices don't ask obvious questions. And once again, there are no critical voices asking obvious questions. That a specious and nonsensical statement like this can go unquestioned is not, I suppose, particularly surprising. But it does raise the question of just how blatantly false the statements of America's political leadership will be allowed to become before someone asks the most simple of questions?
"Mr. President, you have stated on many occasions that on the issue of American War Crimes, you prefer to look forward instead of backwards. Can you explain to the American people how refusing to investigate and prosecute criminal acts prevents you from looking forward? Because I'm at a loss to explain it to my readership".
That's all it would take. Oh, it would certainly have to be asked more than once, but if the most facile nonsense can be offered by a democratically elected government as explanation for the most radical policies, then there is nothing left to prevent them from doing anything they want. The final check on arbitrary government power is the requirement that they provide some kind of coherent framework for the actions they choose. If they can do something like this, to the long-term detriment of the United States of America for purely short-term political reasons and explain it away with slogan, a meaningless mantra, a mere incantation, the people can no longer expect their government to act with their best interests foremost.
Third Base!
I know. It's a very serious subject.
But Abbot and Costello have changed the way I look at the World Health Organization forever.
One has to wonder - do headline writers wake up at night snickering?
All the News that's Fit to...Digitally Distribute
Amid much sound and fury, the newspaper industry as it has existed for a few hundred years is changing into something different. Different both in the manner it delivers it's content, and perhaps more significantly, in the nature of that content itself. In a sense, none of this would be particularly noteworthy were it not for the question of the economic viability of the newspaper companies themselves. The key questions that need to be asked are:
1. Is this a terrible catastrophe or the natural evolution of another industry in the digital age?
2. While the near-term economic disruptions in the news-gathering and publishing industries have quite demonstrably had a profoundly negative impact on quality of reporting in traditional media, will the consumer suffer overall for the radical changes taking place in the newspaper publishing sector?
3. Are there genuine dangers to society and even democracy in the decline of newspaper publishing?
In order to answer those questions, we need to think more critically about what a newspaper is, what it's role in the economy and the culture is, and just how unique or irreplaceable that role might be. When you think about it, a newspaper isn't even mostly about news. A newspaper is a collection of information - local, national and global news, weather, sports, stocks, advertisements, features, opinion, movie times, obituaries - virtually anything that might be of interest to some portion of the readership. This clearly came to be what we think of as a newspaper because for well over a hundred years that was the only way to make this information available to a wide readership at a reasonable cost.
As that is no longer the case, we are free to re-imagine the news delivery model. There's plenty of sports, weather, movie times, TV listings and opinion available on the Internet. No one can make a credible case that the newspapers did a better job of classified advertising than eBay and Craigslist . And in a broadly connected world, is anyone particularly happy reading brief news articles, lacking in both depth and context, about events that happened yesterday?
But caution is in order at this point. When we ask the question "is there anything a newspaper can do better than an Internet connection?", we arrive at the obvious answer that succinctly explains the precipitous decline of the newspaper business. But perhaps we are asking the wrong question. Because it has always been bundled together, we are very quick to conflate news DELIVERY with news GATHERING. As we de -couple the various types of information and deliver it through increasingly specialized websites and blogs funded at best by display advertising, it is reasonable to ask, amid the decline of the for-profit news sector, where the source information will come from. If there's not a bureau in Beijing, will we only get our information on China from Xinhua ? From Congo to Kenya to Capetown, what will be the motivation to provide honest and in-depth Africa coverage? Will it fall to the corporations there to exploit the resource wealth of the African continent to provide this information through their marketing communications shops? It's true that we've seen compelling news from citizen-journalist sources like Kevin Sites and David Axe, and truly worthwhile and effective news-gathering from new media sources like Firedoglake, The Washington Independent, The Huffington Post, even The Daily Beast.
The important question, and one that remains unanswered at this point, is whether there will be enough people, enough opportunity and enough resources to support a broader, more diversified and less corporate news-gathering sector. If there is, newspapers will not be missed at all - the new news will be faster, smarter, more timely, in much greater depth and infinitely richer. The question is all the more important because there can be no doubt that traditional newspaper publishing will not survive the current technologically - driven upheavals. They will be gone in our lifetimes, a kind of historical oddity similar to the 8-track tape and the three martini lunch.
For those who question the "journalistic independence" of these new, smaller, more independent and less accountable news-gathering organizations, while the question is reasonable, it is meaningless. If journalistic "integrity" and balance is what has led the currently dominant media to a place where both sides of any discussion are ALWAYS equal, where we find global warming denial and proponents of government sanctioned torture given equal time to offer patently false, incorrect and misleading coverage, then the very concept died long ago. We can hope for it's revival in the future, but it is not the decline of the newspapers or the rise of Internet news organizations that brought about the current shoddy state of journalism.
It's very important to observe that, at some point, traditional businesses will have to learn to recognize a fundamental evolution within their industry, and instead of fighting to preserve the status quo until it's too late for them to make the profound changes necessary to survive, they will embrace the new paradigms and at least TRY to maintain a leadership role in the new order. The music industry should serve as the classic example of a dinosaur after the asteroid, and as such should provide a cautionary tale to any newly-disrupted industry. With the advent of effective compression (MP3 files) and a delivery/storage/playback mechanism (computers connected to the Internet), there was no longer any NEED for music to be tied to a playback media. And desperately fearful of losing a major source of revenue, the music industry refused to accept this obvious fact and argued for years that even if there was no need for the CD, it was somehow to be perceived as desirable to have it. The market ignored their obviously flawed argument, even when they sought to criminalize the natural technological evolution of their industry's delivery model.
It seems inarguable that when technology provides some fundamental change in either the things people choose to buy or the way in which they buy them, the people who sell those things are faced with an existential challenge. If we have learned anything, we have learned that people will not be bullied or coerced into maintaining the status quo, but rather will support those people and organizations that provide what they want to buy and deliver it the way the consumers want it delivered. To do anything other than embrace the new market reality is to consign one's organization or even an entire industry to the tar pits. There will always be winners and losers, but to refuse to participate in the discussion only guarantees a quicker demise.
All this Talk about Torture is TORTURE!
I know. There are a lot of other things we need to think about and discuss, but the fact that the American government openly sanctioned torture is a very big, very evil thing, and it's kind of hard to get past it. So, allow me to offer two more thoughts on torture.
First, all this conversation about a "Truth and Reconciliation Commission" or some kind of independent inquiry modeled on the 9/11 Commission has got to stop. It's nothing but cover, a fall back position for the apologists and enablers of these criminal acts. First, the thought of an American "Truth and Reconciliation" commission is sickening. Typically, this kind of process is used when a democracy emerges from the rubble of a dictatorship. It is not one legitimate government passing judgement on it's predecessor, but rather one SYSTEM of government trying to find a way to deal with the outrages and excesses of a previous system. It is an early flexing of democracy's muscles, offering transparency and a chance for the people who participated in the crimes of the previous regime to publicly reject those methods and make a positive contribution to the new government.
Here in America, we have had the rule of law for centuries. We aren't trying to heal the wounds of an authoritarian dictatorship's savagery in the name of power. We have continuity, we have laws, and we have processes for investigating violations of those laws.
A 9/11 type commission would be even worse. There would be a "bipartisan" investigation where all the obfuscations, false "debates" and facile justifications would be presented right alongside the brutal crimes themselves. At the end, a volume would be published, "closure" would be attained and we could move on, secure in the knowledge that...What, exactly? That crimes were committed, discussed, analyzed and ultimately ignored. A beacon of freedom and liberty are we.
Nope. The answer is as simple and obvious today as it always has been. You do what the law of the land requires. You have an investigation, which in this case, as members of the Department of Justice are compromised and under suspicion, would be run out of a Special Prosecutor's office. At the end of the investigation, the Special Prosecutor presents his or her evidence to the Grand Jury. If the Grand Jury finds it persuasive, they hand down indictments and the accused have their day in court. Not hard to grasp, not hard to do, certainly not "political retribution". Just dusty, dry laws, followed where the evidence takes them. We should ask for no more, but we should expect no less.
Second, after the revelation that KSM was waterboarded 183 times, let us never again hear any discussion of the odious "ticking time bomb" scenario as justification for inhuman behavior. It is clear that no act of torture, no matter how barbarous, can be expected to yield even the most inaccurate of results in a timely manner. If our damp friend Khalid Sheik Mohammed HAD known about an imminent attack, it is now unquestionable that he could have held out for the day or two necessary for that operation to go forward.
Looks like the bloodthirsty wing of the Republican Party will have to find a new justification to indulge their sweaty fantasies of blood and terror. I suppose that's the problem with actually living out your fantasies. The myth of America's invincible military might died as soon as it was tested in the Mesopotamian sands, and the Jack Bauer - reinforced mythology of using torture to save Western Civilization is exposed as the ridiculous imaginary construct it always has been. Perhaps the lesson they will learn is that they are better off when grownups are actually in control...
Hey, wait! Torture WORKS!
What? This is it? This is the argument? Uh uh. This is weak sauce. Hell, babe, bank robbery "Works" as long as it generates an income stream. Whether or not torturing people works is not, and should not, be any part of this discussion. That's not the point. The question is infinitely simpler than that. The important question is whether we can adopt the brutal, authoritarian tactics of our enemies and still, at the end of the day, claim to have "won".
We can't. Winning means "walking alone though the combat zone and come out with your soul untouched" as none other than Bruce Springsteen told us oh so many years ago. This is important, and it's important to understand the terms offered on the bloody clay of this field. We cannot win if we become something coarse and foul, if we cannot stand tall and say that we never compromised our beliefs and values in order to fight an enemy with neither. And the Americans who are so quick to toss away the things that make us right are no different from bin Laden and his criminal ilk, who recognize no limits, for whom winning the battle is more important than winning the war, no matter what the cost. I despise you all.
I had lunch with a friend the other day. He doesn't follow politics, or news for that matter, but he was quick to tell me that he had "...a hard time feeling sorry for these people..." who we tortured. That's what were up against, in a sense. People who never really considered a constitutional issue, who were never "detained", never found any tendency toward authoritarian government to be troubling to them, as it never affected their lives. People who cannot feel empathy for anyone our government says are "evildoers". After all, didn't they kill 3000 Americans in 2001? "They" seem to expand infinitely to fit the requirments of our fear - mongering government, and nobody seems to be willing to take time out from American Idol to do the minimal research required to find they are not just lying, but manipulating.
Chris Hayes says "...the torturers are winning [the argument]..."
President Obama says he only wants to "look forward, not backward" as if somehow investigating hideous crimes that America has ALWAYS stood against is in itself some kind of obstructive behavior. What madness, what Orwellian doublespeak do we find ourselves swimming in?
It's time for us to speak with an unusually focused clarity. It does not matter if torture "worked". For ANY definition of "worked". It cannot matter, it cannot be ALLOWED to matter, it cannot
ever be a standard by which a government - sanctioned torture policy is evaluated. The answer must be, now and for all time, regardless of the argument, "Who Cares?"
There are nearly infinite arguments I could make to support this position. I could point you to Nuremburg. The trials of Japanese war criminals, the actions of KGB and STASI and NorKor interrogators. I could tell you about all the times we stood, nearly alone, and told dictators and secret police and sick bastards from Chile to the fucking Hanoi Hilton that you might choose this path, but a very large part of the reason we will BURY YOU is that this is a path we will not go down. We will live up to our stated values, our beliefs and our constitution, and we will win because we are right, for fucks sake, and any mentally challenged nine-year-old can recognize that very simple fact.
Except we're not anymore. Except in fighting them we've become them. Except that it's bad enough that in a time of fear and confusion when our country suffered what so many countries have suffered orders of magnitude worse for hundreds of years, we chose to turn our backs ont the values and convictions we hold so dear, the very beliefs and rule of law that we held up as a beacon, a shining light of hope to people around the world, and we took actions we could recant and try to seek absolution for. Except there is a small but significant membership in the American electorate that chooses any form of expediency over beliefs, any short-term solution that might feel good over the pillars of American values that made us different, who chose and continue to choose the same behaviors as our enemies. The cannot see that to become what we are fighting is to lose the fight. They seem to think that there is, what, some nobility, or worse,
efficacy in acting in the same way as those very thugs we have been calling out for decades? I am sick to my soul.
18 and Life to Go
So American Federal Prosecutors are going to ask the court to imprison Abdiwali Abdiqadir Muse for the rest of his life. I don't know, maybe I'm just "objectively soft on piracy", but this seems neither fair nor appropriate. This is a desperately poor kid from Somalia. I'm not sure you or I or the Federal Prosecutor has any REAL understanding of his life circumstances nor the things he's had to see and deal with in his short life.
While he certainly committed a crime and needs to be dealt with in a criminal process, is it really the best we can do to lock him up for the next seventy years for the crime of being born Somali? This is reminiscent of nothing more than John Walker Lindh, the so-called "American Taliban". At what point does justice stop and pure vindictiveness begin? Where does mercy, compassion and understanding come into play? What is gained by throwing away a life that may very well be infinitely recoverable? How are we served by retribution, when mere justice would suffice?
It just seems to me that there is a wide range of acceptable outcomes in this case, and in many similar cases. And putting a hungry, uneducated Somali teenager in prison forever isn't within that range. If this kid serves two years or eight years, it's possible that there might still be a future for him, and a sad, sordid story might have an outcome that isn't simply tragedy. I have been saddened in recent years as our justice system has gone from something that supports our civilization to something that demeans it. It's become more about vengeance and hate than about justice or even anything even resembling rehabilitation. It's almost as if we don't want to help people avoid criminal behavior - as if repeatedly and severely punishing them feeds something dark within our souls.
Some things are not overwhelming in their complexity. Some things are easy to look at and say "this would be right, and this would be wrong". Some things are clear and simple, and just because we CAN do something does not mean it is something we SHOULD do. Justice can be served simultaneously with civilization, and we can clearly tell that something has gone horribly wrong when in the course of administering justice we demean ourselves as a society...
The Limits of Executive Power
Amid the revelations of a particularly systematic American kind of barbarity and depravity we find in the DoJ Office of Legal Counsel justifications for torturing other human beings, perhaps a larger question needs to be discussed, and possibly even resolved.
Our President has made the unequivocal statement that the front line people, the CIA field agents and their military partners who actually committed the war crimes described in these appalling documents will not be prosecuted nor held to account in any way as long as they were acting in good faith based upon assurances from the Department of Justice that these acts were legal. Now, this may actually be good policy - at least one could make the case that in this type of situation you should prosecute the architects of the policy, not the front line soldiers - but let's set this aside for now. You could also shake your head and ask how anyone involved could have genuinely believed "in good faith" that these ancient, barbaric acts of torture were suddenly and magically legal based on a few documents produced under obvious political pressure, but that's a conversation we can have later.
Here's the BIG question. Under our system of government, can the elected executive simply decide, on his own and based on no law nor constitutional provision, what criminals are prosecuted and what criminals are not? From what provision does this authority derive? Under what statute can the President issue this edict? It doesn't seem that he's granting amnesty - it seems he would have to say what individuals are being granted executive clemency - and typically he would at least wait until after the criminal prosecution has run it's course (see Libby, I. Lewis) to issue the order of clemency.
But immunity? Can he do that? Certainly the DoJ could offer various forms of conditional immunity in order to get the testimony they needed to convict other, more heinous perpetrators of these crimes, but that's not what we have here. This is a sweeping statement that it is the
policy of the United States of America to refuse to prosecute our own torturers and war criminals. One wonders how this mechanism might even work. If an individual Federal or State Prosecutor undertook to investigate and prosecute these horrific crimes of which so much detail is now known, would the President threaten those Prosecutors with prosecution for violating his policy? How far have we drifted from the rule of law when not only is law consistently subverted by policy and political considerations, but our democratically elected President can issue monarchical edicts unsupported by statute or constitution.
For that matter, what would the official reaction of the United States, not to mention the United Nations be if Hu Jintao issued this very same edict. Would the world simply shrug in acceptance that the Chinese torturers acted "in good faith"? Or would the world issue broad statements of denunciation, decrying the authoritarian Chinese government's unwillingness to abide by the rule of law?
It just seems so simple to me. There is plenty of evidence of a crime. Under International Treaty obligations, if not simple integrity and commitment to the rule of law, the United States is required to investigate these allegations. And if there is enough evidence, which there most certainly is, to prosecute them. Now, all hyperbole aside, all that says is the people will have their day in court. If it is the case that the OLC memos authorizing the specific inhumane acts exonerate anyone who followed their guidance in good faith, than it seems obvious that the court would find them not guilty. At least there would have been some process, and the rule of law would be upheld.
Instead, we have a President who has assumed for himself the authority to determine which lawbreakers are tried and which shall go scot-free. This is an unprecedented overreach - it's hard to say that any power the Bush/Cheney cabal claimed for the White House was any more blatantly and illegally arbitrary than this one. President Obama needs to shrug his shoulders and tell the people of the United States and the world that it is not his role, that courts and judges make these decisions, and that he, along with the people, will live with the findings of that court. It is the American way. This is something much less...
The Blood Red Tide is Dimmed
Pirates. Snipers. Head shots. We win.
A sex murder in Tracy, but the perp is a woman.
Some whack job thinks the President can just order firearms confiscation and he shoots three cops.
Another guy who couldn't find a way to live in this land of inequality shoots Oakland cops to stay out of prison.
Minnesota's representative from the 6th District calls for armed insurrection.
And the people trying to solve the financial crisis seem more interested in protecting and enriching the bankers than doing the right thing for America, not to mention the whole world.
Yep. It's unraveling. We're seeing it now. It's slow, and there are times when something happens to make us feel hopeful, but overall, big picture? It's all getting away from us. With hundreds of thousands of American Imperial soldiers on the ground throughout the middle east and south Asia, in order to expand our fight with poor rural people in India, we use robots. Someone explain to me how that exonerates us in a way that manned aircraft would not?
And accelerating the unraveling, the American opposition party has embraced a mindless, racist, tribal, anti-intellectual kind of populist ideology, struggling mightily to prevent the elected American political leadership from diverting American funds to help Americans in need. The cognitive dissonance required to cling to a discredited ideology
against one's own best interests is stunning in it's scope.
The things that must be done to save the economy, maintain an American quality of life, reverse the ravages of climate change and create a peaceful, prosperous world are as obvious as they are necessary. And so, the guardians of the status quo make certain that it is taboo to even discuss them. Reduce the defense budget? Impossible! Place a cost on the negative externalities of carbon-based energy? Not if it costs me one red cent! Restructure the Financial sector? Probably can't win that one - it seems they have "invested" in the political leadership to the point where they own them.
If you step back from the day-to-day news cycle, it's plain to see that things are coming apart, and, at least for Americans, are not going to improve any time soon. The lunatics have been running the asylum for so long that to question their madness is to see them immediately close ranks and shout rationality down. And then they gibber and dance, shouting incoherently and smearing their feces on the future. And, like Alice through the looking glass, we must pretend this is exactly how things should be...
Building a Metaphor: Obama is Lucy, Immigration Reform Legislation is the Football...
And the Republican Party is Charlie Brown. Seriously, this is a fascinating exercise in clinging to an
unpopular and discredited ideology and wondering why you're not competitive in national elections. It's so blind and mindless it's funny.
Why would President Obama choose to start another legislative debate on immigration? After all, if we learned anything the last time it's that the terrified old white guys could prevent any significant
legislation when times were perceived as good - in this economy there's just no hope of getting past their racial hatred and demagoguery to do something either rational or productive.
But just maybe, that's the point. Maybe, from a political perspective, the whole point is to bring out the most irrational, the most clearly racially
bigoted, the most spittle - spewing category of bottom dwelling
wingnuts right about the time the Republican party will be making it's appeal for votes from
something beyond it's white southern conservative
christianist "base". The party has no chance of controlling these people, or preventing them from poisoning the well of popular support.
As a strategy it makes me smile, because the Republican party has been content to encourage the most rabid, loathsome, extreme fringe of their party when it suited their needs, and then ignore them and try to act like statesmen when that wing of the party caused them to be
uncomfortable. But here's the funny part, the paradox of deploying the craziest bigots in your constituency to do your bidding. They are so dependent on their base ideological
dog whistles that they cannot be controlled by anyone, to whatever detriment to your political strategy that might result. And that means that they can not only be deployed by your political allies, but your political enemies have that same control over them.
Time the call for legislation on their pet issue just right, and you'll have the most foul bigots spewing the most evil hatred at the very time you'd like to appeal to that constituency for votes.
And in case the demographics are unfamiliar to you, you just cannot win a national election with your support limited to southern white
christianist bigots. Oh sure, you can win local elections, and even regional elections. But you have given up any hope of representing a national electorate.
My man Obama has not pleased me on the constitutional issues, but as far as the political process goes, he's doing a fine job of keeping the worst elements out of office. So maybe that's enough.
For now...
We know a great deal, and think a great deal about the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Whatever you might think about the wisdom and efficacy of these large-scale military occupations, the implications and consequences of them are broadly and regularly discussed. But there is a third conflict, one that gets reported regularly, but without details, context or critical analysis - the American war in Pakistan.
