67% of Pakistani journalists surveyed said they viewed U.S. drone attacks as acts of terrorism.

81% said the Mumbai hotel attacks in 2008 were acts of terrorism.

This brings to mind two questions:

If we were to survey U.S. journalists, what would the results be? 

What would happen if we were to hear about the drone attacks in the context of “terrorism?” 

(via thedeadline) 

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Pakistani civil right activists protest against the US missile strikes in the country’s tribal areas in Lahore Photo: AFP/GETTY 

Courtesy: The Daily Telegraph

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“But how do they get all these AK-47s out there?” I asked a cab driver last year, while he was telling me about the violence that’s kept his familial village and much of the rest of Pakistan’s hilly tribal northwest in the stone ages. “They build them,” he said nonchalantly.

The bulk of Pakistan’s homemade automatic weapons and explosive devices are forged, built and sold at Darra Adamkhel, a village located near Peshawar where main street is an open-air arms market. Since an explosion at an American weapons depot in the 1980s unleashed scraps of modern weaponry on the region, Darra has served as a kind of Best Buy for tribesman, militants and terrorists, and helped maintain a terribly healthy culture of guns and inter-familial factions. (Efforts to curtail the grassroots arms trade have been mostly in vain, in part because of the lobbying efforts of America’s National Rifle Association.)

A few years ago, VBS’s Suroosh Alvi was taken to the bazaar by a family friend. In October of 2009, hellbent on dying maybe and long after every other Western journalist was banned, he returned for a follow-up. What Suroosh found on his return visit was a smorgasboard of DIYkilling tech that’s helping to feed increasing tensions and violence between just about everyone — the Taliban, local tribes, the Pakistani army, the American army — and maintain a stubborn tradition in which toting a Kalishnikov is simply a sign of honor, like a fancy watch. A fancy watch that can blow your head off. (via urbankiwi)

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According to NAF’s research, there have been 215 drone attacks since 2004 in the bad-guy tromping grounds of northwest Pakistan, killing between 1,372 and 2,125 people. (The wide variation in estimates shows how difficult it is to track these stats, even with press and government reports.) Of those, 1061 to 1584 were called militants “in reliable press accounts.” For those of you keeping score at home, that means that between 23 and 25 percent of all deaths from drone strikes are noncombatants. But here’s the worse news:

Of all those semi-confirmed deaths since 2004, only 36 have been “militant leaders,” like Al Qaeda’s third in command. (It goes without saying that we haven’t hit the terrorist group’s two really big fish, Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al-Zawahri.) That means that only about 2 percent of NATO’s drone kills were strategically important enemy personnel. If Meat Loaf were a US combatant commander in South Asia, he’d have to cut a new track: ”Two Out of 100 Ain’t Bad.”

I’mma go all Lollywood on you guys and post a song from a movie I found to be pretty decent.  It gets all climactic and stuff, and I dig it. (via sukoon)

OST Khuda Kay Leye - Tiluk Kamod (IMDB, Official Site, Wikipedia)

By Madiha R. Tahir
Date Published: December 1, 2010

Madiha R. Tahir is a freelance journalist based in Pakistan. Her work has appeared in Foreign Affairs, The National, and The Columbia Journalism Review, as well as on “Democracy Now!,” PRI’s “The World” and other venues. She is also co-editor of a forthcoming volume, Dispatches from Pakistan.

John Pilger, Ken Loach, and Jemima Khan were among six people in court willing to offer surety. They all offered at least £20,000. An anonymous individual offered surety of £60,000.