Bill Van Auken
Pakistani villagers offer funeral prayers for people killed by an
earlier US terror attack, in Miranshah, capital of Pakistani tri-
bal region of North Waziristan along the Afghanistan border.The Obama administration ordered new drone attacks on Pakistan over the weekend, killing at least a dozen people in the tribal area of South Waziristan.
Sunday’s strike involved two drones, which fired two missiles each into a home and a car in the Wana district of the northwestern Pakistan tribal region near the Afghan border. Ten people were killed, and another ten wounded.
The attack was mounted as men came to offer condolences to the family of an alleged commander of the Maulvi Nazir group, one of what differing accounts put at between two and four men killed less than 24 hours earlier in a Saturday drone strike.
The group, led by Nazir Ahmed, is considered by the Pakistani government as “good Taliban”, because it does not seek to overthrow the regime in Islamabad and has rarely opposed the presence of the Pakistani army in South Waziristan. It has united, however, with other Pashtun groups on both sides of the border to fight the US-led occupation of Afghanistan.
The attack on a group offering condolences is in line with previous strikes that have targeted funerals for drone attack victims, as well as rescuers attempting to dig dead and wounded from the rubble left by Hellfire missile strikes.
The Pakistani press reported that the missile strikes razed the house to the ground, and that local people rushed to aid the injured and recover the remains of the dead.
News accounts of both Saturday’s and Sunday’s strikes described all of the victims as “suspected militants”. However, they follow the publication last week of a lengthy article in the New York Times detailing how President Barack Obama selects victims for assassination strikes and personally approves many of the so-called “signature strikes”—those directed not at identified “suspects,” but rather at crowds considered to be engaged in “suspicious behavior”.
The article revealed that Obama had approved a CIA policy of classifying any combat-aged male slain in a drone strike as a “militant,” in the absence of definite evidence to the contrary. This method essentially legitimizes the killing of any adult male in the border regions targeted for drone attacks.
