Category Archives: Pakistan

Please tell me, Mr President, why a US drone assassinated my mother

by Rafiq ur Rehman, theguardian.com, October 25, 2013

The last time I saw my mother, Momina Bibi, was the evening before Eid al-Adha. She was preparing my children’s clothing and showing them how to make sewaiyaan, a traditional sweet made of milk. She always used to say: the joy of Eid is the excitement it brings to the children.

Last year, she never had that experience. The next day, 24 October 2012, she was dead, killed by a US drone that rained fire down upon her as she tended her garden.

Nobody has ever told me why my mother was targeted that day. The media reported that the attack was on a car, but there is no road alongside my mother’s house. Several reported the attack was on a house. But the missiles hit a nearby field, not a house. All reported that five militants were killed. Only one person was killed – a 67-year-old grandmother of nine.

My three children – 13-year-old Zubair, nine-year-old Nabila and five-year-old Asma – were playing nearby when their grandmother was killed. All of them were injured and rushed to hospitals. Were these children the “militants” the news reports spoke of? Or perhaps, it was my brother’s children? They, too, were there. They are aged three, seven, 12, 14, 15 and 17 years old. The eldest four had just returned from a day at school, not long before the missile struck.

But the United States and its citizens probably do not know this. Continue reading Please tell me, Mr President, why a US drone assassinated my mother

Enough! Damn this continued violence


Up to 600 worshipers had attended the service and were leaving to receive free food being distributed on the lawn outside when two explosions ripped through the crowd. Photograph by Mohammad Sajjad/Associated Press

Enough blood has been shed in the past few days to make any sane person question how anyone could possibly justify such cold-blooded and senseless attacks on innocent people. The poison gas in Syria is bad enough, but now we hear that the Somali Shabab have decided to kill shoppers in a Nairobi mall rather than play Captain Hook off the East African coast and now at least 78 Pakistani Christians are killed in a blast at a historic church. This is the ugly side of religion. More than a hijacking of Islam, this is dragging the faith that produced great scholars like Ibn Sina and al-Ghazali into the sewer. To say that the Prophet Muhammad would have condoned this kind of indiscriminate murder is as absurd as the medieval Crusader claim that Jesus would bless the slaughter of Jews and Muslims. But at least the crusades ended several centuries ago.

Muslims killing fellow Muslims or Muslims targeting Christians for death are both equally insane acts. Every day the death toll rises in Iraq and Syria, as though we have returned to the days of the Mongols and Mamluks. Continue reading Enough! Damn this continued violence

Drone Strikes


New America Foundation says that US drone attacks in Yemen have risen from 18 in 2011 to 53 in 2012 [Reuters]

[Drones are now at the top of the news cycle. This commentary was originally published in the January online edition of Anthropology News.]

The Error in the War on Terror

In 1978 I arrived in the Yemen Arab Republic to begin 18 months ethnographic fieldwork. At the time North Yemen, as it was called, was in full development mode. A protracted civil war after the fall of the traditional Zaydi imamate had ended only a decade before. Aid was pouring in from the United Nations, the United States, Germany, France, The Netherlands, Russia and mainland China as the country was in the throes of building itself up by its sandalstraps. Once settled in my field site, the beautiful spring-fed highland valley of al-Ahjur, I could not help but notice that just about everyone was armed, many with kalashnikovs. This was a tribal area, where the central government exercised little control, but I never felt safer in my life.

I felt safe because as a foreigner I was protected under tribal customary law. At this time the United States was well liked, often in contrast to the atheist communists of the Soviet Union who supported the socialist regime in South Yemen. This was before any hint of terrorism, before the Iran hostage affair and long before al-Qaeda. Osama Bin Laden had just turned 21 and was still in college. In this tribal area there was an honor code, exemplified by the Yemeni term qabyala, that required protection of unarmed guests, as it did women and children. In 2004, on a return visit to the valley, I found myself in the difficult situation of explaining why I did not support the U.S. invasion of Iraq. One of my Yemeni friends noted that he used to think that America was different, but now he believed that the U.S. president was as bad as his own, Ali Abdullah Salih. Continue reading Drone Strikes

Suffer the little children


Suffer the Little Children to Come Unto Me, by Lucas Cranach the Elder, 1538

Growing up on the King James Version of the Gospels, I well remember the force of a verse from Mark 10:14 in which Jesus, in anger, said: “Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God.” The occasion was when several parents brought children to Jesus to be blessed, but were discouraged by his disciples. This past week has seen the suffering of little children around the world. Last Friday America was gripped by the tragedy of twenty elementary children and six adults gunned down by a disturbed young man, who first killed his mother in bed and then at the school took his own life. In a nation that wears its constitutional “right to bear arms” on its political sleeves, this was a shot to the gut. For all of us whose children have gone through the public school system, the shock lingers. It could have been any local school in any state. It could have been any of our children. A killer with a gun has denied them life. This suffering is not what Jesus meant when he said “suffer the little children to come unto me.” One need not be an expert in 17th century English to understand the meaning of the verse.

But children continue to suffer at the hands of adults all over the world. In Pakistan on Monday six health workers engaged in a project to immunize children were shot to death by extremists who have been told that such a program to save children’s lives is actually a Western plot to undermine Islam. Along with five brave women and one man, the Pakistani children who will not have immunity from polio will also suffer. The irony that six adults were killed both in Pakistan and in New Town, Connecticut is worth reflecting on. In both cases those trying to save children became victims; in both cases children suffer. Continue reading Suffer the little children

On Drones


The Center for Civilians in Conflict and Columbia Law School’s Human rights Clinic have recently produced a report on the impact of drones on civilians. Below is the abstract; the full report can be found in pdf format here.

The Civilian Impact of Drones: Unexamined Costs, Unanswered Questions
Publication | 29 Sep 2012

This joint report from the Center for Civilians in Conflict and Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Clinic is an in-depth look at the US government’s covert drone program and its impact on civilian populations. Our objective is to critically assess US government procedures and standards for ensuring civilian protection and responding to civilian harm from drone strikes conducted both outside of full-scale military operations and with a degree of secrecy. The study is based on a review of publicly available materials, interviews with current and former government officials, responses to requests for information from agencies, and previous field interviews by Center for Civilians in Conflict.

Drones are touted as the most precise and humane weapons platform in the history of warfare. The technological advance is significant, but covert drone strikes carry costs for civilians and local communities even as they become a policy norm. Blinded by the promise of this technology and reports of short-term effectiveness in killing militants, policymakers are failing to ask hard questions of the drones program, including whether other tactics or strategies are more appropriate to counterterrorism strategy, and whether US expansion of strikes to new places and against new groups is truly justified.

Malala and malevolence

Pakistani school girls pray for the recovery of teen activist Malala Yousufzai at their school in Peshawar on Friday.

A fourteen-year old girl is shot in the head for wanting to be educated. It is hard to imagine a more sadistic premeditated attack on innocence. Her name is Malala and her attackers are Taliban extremists who have so perverted the teachings of Islam that they commit the ultimate modern-day shirk: assuming that their cowardly act has divine sanction. The assassination attempt on a school bus is now one of those shots heard across the world. To be sure, the gunshots that have ripped through bodies in Muslim countries number in the thousands these days. The attack on Malala does not override the horrific bloodshed taking place in Syria, the continuing violence in Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere. But it stands out as a symbol of what goes terribly wrong when partisan religious fervor enters the political arena.

Pakistan’s president, Asif Ali Zardari, recognizes this: “”The Taliban attack on the 14-year-old girl, who from the age of 11 was involved in the struggle for education for girls, is an attack on all girls in Pakistan, an attack on education, and on all civilised people.” He recognizes that such malevolence puts every young girl in Pakistan in danger and threatens to further divide debates in his country into violent conflict. But this is not only an attack on “all civilised people”; this is an assault on all people. And, as the photograph of a young Muslim girl praying above shows so well, an attack on the very idea of the merciful God she prays to.

I have never met Malala and probably never will. But Malala is my daughter, my wife and my mother. Shooting her is an attack on my family and yours. If the shooters dared to whisper bi-ism-Allah-al-rahman-al-rahim before they pulled the trigger against a child of God, may that same God have mercy on their souls, because they never learned the true meaning of the words they spoke. Continue reading Malala and malevolence

Pew on Muslim Extremists

The Pew Foundation has recently released a report entitled Most Muslims Want Democracy, Personal Freedoms, and Islam in Political Life on July 10, 2012. Click here to read the overview and gain access to a free pdf of the full report.


Here is what they say about Muslims views of extremists…

“Extremist groups are largely rejected in predominantly Muslim nations, although significant numbers do express support for radical groups in several countries. For instance, while there is no country in which a majority holds a favorable opinion of the Palestinian organization Hamas, it receives considerable support in Tunisia, Jordan and Egypt.

The militant Lebanese Shia group Hezbollah receives its highest overall ratings in Tunisia, where nearly half express a positive opinion. Sizable minorities in both Jordan and Egypt also have a favorable view, but Hezbollah’s image has been declining in both countries in recent years. In its home country, views about Hezbollah are sharply divided along sectarian lines: 94% of Shia, 33% of Christians, and 5% of Sunnis give the group favorable marks.

Across all six nations, less than 20% have a positive opinion about al Qaeda or the Taliban. In Turkey and Lebanon, support for these groups is in the single digits. However, fully 19% of Egyptians rate these extremist organizations favorably.”