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U.S. drone strike kills 30 pine nut farm workers in Afghanistan

reuters.com

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Re: U.S. drone strike kills 30 pine nut farm workers in Afghanistan

#41

Post by petre »

Both the Taliban and the US are killing innocent civillian bystanders. This is more and more common with drone strikes. It was konwn that it's pine nut picking season and the governor of the province was informed. There was wither miscomunication or the US forces simply ignored the fact and launched the strike anyway.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-afghanistan-attack-drones...

The Taliban were all too coward to plant a car bomb in the proximity of the government intelligence department building, so what they did was to plant it next to a nearby hospital.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/09/killed-car-bomb-attac...

Re: U.S. drone strike kills 30 pine nut farm workers in Afghanistan

#42

Post by yakshaving_jgt »

simplecomplex wrote: post #31
draugadrotten wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their feelings will be affected and rightly so, it is a tradegy. However the feelings of a few people about an error can not be the single parameter to decide if drone strikes are used. War have casualties. What about the feelings of the children and friends after 9.11, Charlie Hebdo, Bataclan, Nice, Stockholm, Trèbes, Paris, Liège and Strasbourg? I could go on. Of the 24 jihadist attacks in the EU in 2018, 10 occurr…

Afghanistan never attacked the US. repeat that to yourself a couple times. Invading them isn’t defense or war it’s fucking murder you idiot.

The Taliban (who the drone strikes were targeting) are at war with Afghanistan. The US is allied with Afghanistan’s government.

Wars aren’t as simple as good guys vs bad guys fighting between their own respective countries.

Re: U.S. drone strike kills 30 pine nut farm workers in Afghanistan

#43

Post by smhost »

Smithalicious wrote: post #33
draugadrotten wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their feelings will be affected and rightly so, it is a tradegy. However the feelings of a few people about an error can not be the single parameter to decide if drone strikes are used. War have casualties. What about the feelings of the children and friends after 9.11, Charlie Hebdo, Bataclan, Nice, Stockholm, Trèbes, Paris, Liège and Strasbourg? I could go on. Of the 24 jihadist attacks in the EU in 2018, 10 occurr…

This post is wrong for obvious reasons, but it's a good point that it goes both ways: drone strikes create anti-western sentiment, and Muslim terrorist attacks create anti-Muslim sentiment.

yes, they're mutually reinforcing. in a perverse way, u.s. drone strikes are good for terrorist organizations, and terrorist attacks are good for major stakeholders of military capital.

that's why you will see some perverts who will openly reminisce about the days after 9/11 and how we were all united, etc.

at some point, cooler heads should intervene, but fear is just too easy to engineer, apparently.

Re: U.S. drone strike kills 30 pine nut farm workers in Afghanistan

#44

Post by concordDance »

paganel wrote: post #36
concordDance wrote: post #30

Not that this isn't a tragedy (and/or mass murder depending on your viewpoint), but I don't think hackernews is the right venue for this. Hackernews should try and keep to tech and away from politics or its quality will continue to degrade. For instance the comments here are mostly not saying anything that hasn't already been said a thousand times before (is this just outrage porn?).

> , but I don't think hackernews is the right venue for this I would think the same, but then you’ve got things like project Maven which is very closely related to things like US drone strikes and which definitely deserves its place on HN. For example in this particular case, I’d be interested to know how the initial identification has been made from aerial views alone (I suppose they were based on aerial views) that…

I'd agree with you if a noticable proportion of the comments so far had any discussion of the technical aspects, but they don't. (Two out of the 40 comments could maybe be considered discussing the technical aspects and yours goes into the most depth)

Re: U.S. drone strike kills 30 pine nut farm workers in Afghanistan

#45

Post by EliRivers »

luckylion wrote: post #29
EliRivers wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that there is an inherent difference between drone killings and atrocities committed by people. The drone killings are anonymous, out of the sky, with no idea who the guilty party is besides a nebulous "USA" or "the West"; a vacuum of information besides a robotic, faceless apology in a press release (that is itself just more insult, more humiliation), and the knowledge that a foreign country can reach out an…

> Even if the terrorist gets away, it's recognised that it was an individual(s). That's a tough sell when (large) parts of communities are complicit, hiding, funding, supporting the individuals. It's my impression that the primary difference is that we expect better from advanced nations and their citizens, not that there's a large difference in behavior. Denmark officially murdering people because of their sexual id…

That's a tough sell when (large) parts of communities are complicit, hiding, funding, supporting the individuals.

I'm unconvinced; I believe it's not a tough sell. This is based on my observations of to whom people ascribe these crimes. They blame individuals first. Even if they should ascribe more blame to the organisations behind those individuals, those individuals are recognised (rightly or wrongly) as the primary culprits.

When I see news reports of such things, it's individual people that are presented as the culprits. News articles and Wiki articles name the individuals involved. While they do have organisations and groups behind them, if you ask people "who did this" you don't get a nebulous set of organisations; you get a name.

Re: U.S. drone strike kills 30 pine nut farm workers in Afghanistan

#46

Post by mola »

draugadrotten wrote: post #23
gcatalfamo wrote: post #14

This is how you create terrorists. What do you think the children and friends feelings towards the US will be from now on? People get radicalized for much less than that.

Their feelings will be affected and rightly so, it is a tradegy. However the feelings of a few people about an error can not be the single parameter to decide if drone strikes are used. War have casualties. What about the feelings of the children and friends after 9.11, Charlie Hebdo, Bataclan, Nice, Stockholm, Trèbes, Paris, Liège and Strasbourg? I could go on. Of the 24 jihadist attacks in the EU in 2018, 10 occurr…

But you are not really opposing his theory. The terrorists are counting on this effect. They want to trigger radicalization of the populous in their target countries. Their idea is to stir up war, because in chaos there's a potential of drastic radical changes. If you truly want to fight terror, you should focus on prevention and educating the masses to not get drawn to a blood thirsty revenge cycle. Because once you start thinking like a terrorist, i.e. justifying civilian bloodshed for ideology, demanding violent response, etc. they win.

Re: U.S. drone strike kills 30 pine nut farm workers in Afghanistan

#47

Post by black_puppydog »

luckylion wrote: post #29
EliRivers wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that there is an inherent difference between drone killings and atrocities committed by people. The drone killings are anonymous, out of the sky, with no idea who the guilty party is besides a nebulous "USA" or "the West"; a vacuum of information besides a robotic, faceless apology in a press release (that is itself just more insult, more humiliation), and the knowledge that a foreign country can reach out an…

> Even if the terrorist gets away, it's recognised that it was an individual(s). That's a tough sell when (large) parts of communities are complicit, hiding, funding, supporting the individuals. It's my impression that the primary difference is that we expect better from advanced nations and their citizens, not that there's a large difference in behavior. Denmark officially murdering people because of their sexual id…

> when (large) parts of communities are complicit

you put parentheses around the "large" but I'm still gonna pick on this. For my part, I have yet to hear of a major jihadist attack in the west in which the perpetrators and their supporters were not completely surrounded by police and intelligence personel. In Germany we're watching a parliamentary commission pick apart what happened in the "lone wolf" case where someone drove a truck into a christmas market in Berlin. "You can't do anything about these things!" people exclaim. They're lone wolves after all. BS. That guy, and his supporters, were in constant contact with embedded sources around their milieu. I'm not a big friend of the police state as it is, and especially of intelligence services. And this story and others like it make it really hard to still believe in incompetence and bad coordination as the sources for all the fuck-ups that lead to him succeeding in the first place, and then the crucial witnesses being conveniently deported days after.

But my real point (sorry for digressing here for a bit) is that even in this in-depth investigation, the number of active supporters was tiny. And they were not even really organized. It was more like "I have a friend here ho will help me out, and one here, and one here." Your statement (even with parentheses) does not reflect how small these "parts" are.

Re: U.S. drone strike kills 30 pine nut farm workers in Afghanistan

#49

Post by golergka »

mad_tortoise wrote: post #35
draugadrotten wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their feelings will be affected and rightly so, it is a tradegy. However the feelings of a few people about an error can not be the single parameter to decide if drone strikes are used. War have casualties. What about the feelings of the children and friends after 9.11, Charlie Hebdo, Bataclan, Nice, Stockholm, Trèbes, Paris, Liège and Strasbourg? I could go on. Of the 24 jihadist attacks in the EU in 2018, 10 occurr…

How many "error's" does the US make? Far too many for them to be called "error's" anymore. How many kids were radicalised by the US going into Iraq and killing millions of their people? Tens of thousands of orphans, with an evil imperial army coming into their home, bombing their farms, raiding their homes, murdering civilians. Enough to create ISIS and radicalise thousands upon thousands more. How many families were…

> How many "error's" does the US make?

Usually it's measured in the ratio of civilian casualties to combatants, and as far as I remember, US is keeping this ratio exceptionally low in comparison to other conflicts.

That's the key point here: your criticism applies to any war at all. War is hell, everybody knows that. To be objective in your judgement about US though, you have to quantatively compare different conflicts to each other.

Re: U.S. drone strike kills 30 pine nut farm workers in Afghanistan

#50

Post by oh_sigh »

gcatalfamo wrote: post #14

This is how you create terrorists. What do you think the children and friends feelings towards the US will be from now on? People get radicalized for much less than that.

I hear this a lot but is there any basis for this? Were any of the 9/11 attackers widowed/orphaned by the US? Or were they just whipped up in religious fervor and an abstract idea of a cultural war with the US?

And does it go the other way? Do you create violent anti-Islamists when Muslims commit terror attacks? Were the orphans of 9/11 more likely to sign up for the US military, or commit hate crimes against Muslims than their non-directly-affected peers?

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