pakistan (2)

4063643596?profile=original.

Business Insider - Military & Defense.
Dec. 17, 2012.

www.businessinsider.com/did-we-just-kill-a-kid-nicola-abe-der-spiegel-brandon-bryant-2012-12

[Note: Iraq's main export is Oil.
Afghanistan's main export is Opium - What are we fighting for?].

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The New Mexico desert gets blistering hot, but inside the small windowless container where Brandon Bryant worked as a drone operator for the U.S. Air Force it stays a cool 63 degrees all year long.

Nicola Abé at der Spiegel spoke with Bryant, no longer in the Air Force, who relays a disturbing and tragic scene from his time inside that isolated container in the American desert.

Sixty-three finger numbing degrees and Bryant describes sitting with a group of other pilots looking at more than a dozen computer monitors. The crew are directing drones over Afghanistan 6,250 miles away and the screens jump with a two to five second delay, as infrared video sent from the UAVs whips through the air to New Mexico.

When the order to fire on a target arrives, Bryant paints the roof of a hut with the laser that will guide in a Hellfire missile released by the pilot beside him.

"These moments are like in slow motion," he says to Abé.

No doubt, because on this occasion Bryant says a child walked from behind the building at the last second. Too late for him to do anything else but ask the other pilot, "Did we just kill a kid?"

From der Spiegel:

"Yeah, I guess that was a kid," the pilot replied.

"Was that a kid?" they wrote into a chat window on the monitor.

Then, someone they didn't know answered, someone sitting in a military command center somewhere in the world who had observed their attack. "No. That was a dog," the person wrote.

They reviewed the scene on video. A dog on two legs?

The article follows another widely publicized story from the Marine Times about children killed by Americans on Afghan soil published just weeks ago. While obviously a tragedy for the victims and their families, Bryant describes the incredible toll taken on U.S. troops required to obey orders producing such dire results.

From his mother's couch in Missoula, Montana Bryant talks of his 6,000 Air Force flight hours and says he used to dream in infrared. "I saw men, women and children die during that time," he says. "I never thought I would kill that many people. In fact, I thought I couldn't kill anyone at all."

The three part article digs deeply into the life of a troubled former servicemember and the war-fighting policies that don't look to be changing anytime soon.

Read it in full here.

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Between 12-18 years of age, Rajjpuut read almost all the works of Mark Harris, Walter Tevis, John Steinbeck and Mark Twain. One memorable line he encountered in Spanish in a Steinbeck novel was “. . . the only wh_re he found was his unfaithful wife” (loose translation of a Spanish barroom proverb from “East of Eden” ???) which struck the then very naïve Rajjpuut as the ultimate word in betrayal . . . certainly today the adult Rajjpuut might refer to recent revelations via wiki-leak and call Pakistan "an unfaithful wife" as a result.

Rajjpuut generally believes that leakers of secret and top secret documents deserve death or death and dismemberment for betraying our country and putting all of us, especially our military at risk -- however, the wikileak revelation of a huge stockpile of Afghanistan War documents might just prove to be a blessing in disguise. You see, it appears that our military and our state department have been lying to us and apparently to themselves for at least six years now as they’’ve relied upon Pakistan as an ally against the Taliban-led insurgency in Afghanistan and provided that same Pakistan with $6 Billion in military aid just for the purpose of fighting that insurgency. In other words we have been married to an unfaithful spouse whose promiscuity has betrayed us to point of literally making our troops murder victims . . . .

Besides all the other foolish short-sightedness tied up in this notion, is the fact that A) Pakistan has a nuclear-armed military which could fall into the Taliban’s hands, as well as that initial release by wikileak of documents indicates that B) Bin Laden’s whereabouts is probably known by the Pakistani secret police C) that money given by America may be financing the Taliban and Al Queda D) under Bin Laden an Al Queda burser may be attending meetings with Iran on one side of Pakistan and with the North Koreans in Pakistan itself to arrange weapons deals and E) when drone missiles hit Al Queda and Taliban targets in Pakistan, Pakistani secret police have played a role in spreading the uproar over “the deaths of innocent civilians” by the Americans. Now we (the American people) know who our enemies are and we can demand our military face the facts.

Rajjpuut suggests not one dime more be paid to Pakistan until Bin Laden is delivered to us; until the Taliban and Al Queda are rooted out of Pakistan and North Korean and that Pakistan be informed that further aid or comfort or complicity in hiding Taliban and Al Queda be announced as grounds for war against Pakistan. Since as a practical matter it’s very likely that none of these laudable demands/goals will be forthcoming, Rajjpuut suggests a different approach concentrating upon 100% drone protection of the border of Afghanistan from encroachment by Iran, by forces from Pakistan, from all others within two miles into Pakistan, etc. and within six miles inside Afghanistan. That should provide our troops with a seven mile “buffer zone” and ample opportunity for satellite reconnaissance internal to Afghanistan to allow us a huge strategic and tactical advantage over any trespassers . . . and the opportunity village by village to rout out the Taliban and for our nation-building projects to work. AMEN!

Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,

Rajjpuut

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