This is deeply tragic. I wish the story gave more details. Based on the provincial governor's statement, it sounds like U.S. forces were relying on the Afghan government's intelligence assessment.
I also wish news sources would be more careful about suggesting that there are autonomous killer robots in the sky. The drone didn't target anything. A remote pilot did, based on information he/she was provided.
The US can't sustain casualties and maintain any popular support for the war or the reputation of the military, so they use remote control killing machines on people the media don't care about. Unless you have people on the ground (and even then!) you can't really be sure of your intel. This media strategy allows them to not care about the quality of the intel. While the power of the state is still terrifying, it is vastly weaker than during the Vietnam era.
I have kids and live in a rural U.S. town. I fear "normal" things such as drugs, school/gun violence, sex predators, etc. This... this is next level. I couldn't even fathom what it would be like if missiles rained from the sky at faster-than-sound speeds - from another country no less. You could say: "There aren't terrorists in rural U.S. towns," but I'd argue that isn't the case anymore with all the mass shootings, racial hatred, and so on. The world is in such a sad state.
Now imagine “U.S. drone strike kills 30 pine nut farm workers in France” and feel the difference (which is non-existent). Then it goes on tv and reads the list of this morning’s evil men who must be stopped.
I’m pretty sure there aren’t people in France trying to establish a violent worldwide theocracy, and even if there were, the French government would have a handle on it/not be complicit.
We don’t conduct missions in Afghanistan for funsies. We do it because there is no State we can lean on to stamp down on the extremists.
Notice the wording - the drone targeted the workers. The drone didn’t make a decision and target the workers, the drone pilot targeted the workers, and whomever was standing behind them gave the order to launch the missle. The whole “I’m just doing what the computer said” defense only works in movies.
It doesn't work even in the movies. Last American movie I watched which featured a drone strike against civilians, involved an advanced AI that recommended not to proceed because of insufficient information, that got overruled by the president. The drone strike hit a wedding, which led to increase in attack on Americans, making the AI attempt to kill the president and most of the US government, following the "protect against all enemies, foreign and domestic" doctrine.
What? That defense was presented 0 times in the article.
Here's the relevant U.S. quote, "U.S. forces conducted a drone strike..." the subject is clear and there is no equivocating about who was responsible for the drone strike.
The only sentence that says »[...] a drone targeted [the workers] [...]« is a quote from a tribal elder. I think the wording in the article is actually pretty good and Reuters has, as far as I know, pretty high standards for their wording in general, for example they never call someone a terrorist.
It’s possible some autonomous system marked them as candidates,
> In 2014, former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden said in a public debate, “We kill people based on metadata.”
> According to multiple reports and leaks, death-by-metadata could be triggered, without even knowing the target’s name, if too many derogatory checks appear on their profile. “Armed military aged males” exhibiting suspicious behavior in the wrong place can become targets, as can someone “seen to be giving out orders.” Such mathematics-based assassinations have come to be known as “signature strikes.”
> Notice the wording - the drone targeted the workers. ... The whole “I’m just doing what the computer said” defense only works in movies.
Fair enough, but I would not read too much into that choice of words. For example:
“The workers had lit a bonfire and were sitting together when a drone targeted them,” tribal elder Malik Rahat Gul told Reuters by telephone from Wazir Tangi.
I don't believe that Malik Rahat Gul (or possibly, his translator) was attempting to relieve anyone of moral agency or responsibility, do you?
Imagine being the person (even if you had little personal autonomy in the matter) who pulled the trigger or pressed the button. Imagine finding out what you had done. Would it break you?
Don't get me wrong, I love an Adam Curtis film as much as the next guy, but...
His films should be interpreted as you might interpret a Malcolm Gladwell book: An entertaining, insightful, witty, and educational way of telling a story that the author wants to tell, supported by hand-picked facts and part-truths, whilst ignoring other information that might reveal a more well-rounded story.
I wonder why, even though we generally try to be skeptical of the news, I’m not seeing many comments here that question whether what this article is saying is even accurate.
How exactly does the reporter know which people are IS fighters? Is there some notion that militants don’t ever also farm?
Also in these comments there seems to be a huge double standard. The idea the United States might accidentally kill some civilians is somehow morally outrageous, but the regular and deliberate targeting of civilians by the Taliban and the IS as they attempt to completely destabilize the Afghan government is taken as somehow normal?
> How exactly does the reporter know which people are IS fighters? Is there some notion that militants don’t ever also farm?
The article says it explicitly: the information is sourced from Afghan officials.
You could say that this may not be the most trustworthy source in this case, and I'd agree, but on the other hand, the problem of mounting civilian casualties of US drone strikes is already a decade if not more old, was widely reported on a few years ago, and is continuously being investigated by various organizations. If what Afghan officials are saying is true, it would not the least bit surprising - and that fact is a huge problem.
> Also in these comments there seems to be a huge double standard. The idea the United States might accidentally kill some civilians is somehow morally outrageous, but the regular and deliberate targeting of civilians by the Taliban and the IS as they attempt to completely destabilize the Afghan government is taken as somehow normal?
I think no one in their right mind would say that what the ISIS or other terrorist groups are doing is anything but repugnant. They're doing evil things, that's a baseline fact, so it's unmentioned - there's nothing interesting in pointing this out. What's more interesting is where did ISIS come from and why are they doing what they're doing, and a significant part of the answer to that question is American military excursions and regular, continued murder of civilians using remote-piloted drones. ISIS may be monsters, but the US is supposed to hold itself to higher standards, not step down to the same level.
The "Good Guys" are fighting the "Bad Guys" because the "Bad Guys" do "Bad Guy Stuff".
It is taken as normal that the "Bad Guys" are "Bad". When they do "Bad Guy Stuff", it is further justification for the "Good Guys" continuing to target them. "Normal" does not mean "OK", it just means that it is what is expected - "Bad Guys are Bad" is not news.
It is morally outrageous when the "Good Guys" do "Bad Guy Stuff", because it calls into question the whole "We are good, they are bad" story that the "Good folk at home" are told. How can we be the "Good Guys" if we are killing innocents?
It also reinforces the "We are good, they are bad" story that the "Bad Guys" are selling their folk at home. When the "Great Satan" kills your innocent friends and family when they are at work picking pine nuts, or at a wedding, it becomes easier to encourage you to take up arms against them.
Can we really call it an accident when strikes are made at weddings, funerals, farms, vans, and even double striking to kill first responders based on a phone chip signal that might have, at some point in time, been used by rebels?
In fact it really doesn't matter how we see it, but how they see it.
Every strike has a chance of producing more rebels than they kill and I have a hard time thinking the arms industry doesn't also believe that.
I’m against continued involvement in Afghanistan, for financial and practical reasons. That said, many folks have trouble wrapping their heads around all this because they’re moral relativists. The problem with terrorism is not merely the mechanics of asymmetric warfare. Civilians dying is bad and we should avoid it, but it’s obviously not morally dispositive since we do it too. If a foreign power occupied America, Americans would do the exact same thing. In fact, that’s what Americans did during the Revolution. You can’t hope to make sense of the issue unless you morally analyze the ends for which people are fighting. Islamic State is wrong and must be stamped out because the end for which they’re fighting is wrong. Americans fighting the British to establish a Republic, by contrast, is right.
Think the size of this incident prompted immediate reporting, so I'd trust it to be fairly accurate in scope, but typically statistical sourcing is done by UNAMA (cited in article) and I'd consider them authoritative and accurate.
To your point, typically the casualty verification (which UNAMA is tasked with) takes a very long time. Here's an example of three UNAMA reports stating three widely different casualty figures for aerial operations in 2011:
- 2011 report: deaths and injuries at 305 (pg 24)
- 2012 report: deaths and injuries at 353 (pg 31)
- 2014 report: deaths and injuries at 415 (pg 94)
These reports were released years apart and reflect revised figures for 2011. It simply takes that long to verify accounts and corroborate reports, reconcile conflicting information. It will take years to get a definitive confirmation for this incident.
Here's something seen in the UNAMA reports that's more harrowing than drone weapon releases mentioned in the article. When a drone operator merely reports activity, a typical response to it is that the local forces send out a team to investigate the location. They do this at night. Vehicles pull up, spotlights come on and distorted loudspeakers come on shouting screams at people to stay inside and wait. Disoriented and confused civilians, trying to make sense of the noise, do what any normal human beings do, which is go outside to see what this is all about. At that point, even children get shot because they're contravening instructions. They become a number in a report.
Wow, whiddershins, those are some baseless comments.
> How exactly does the reporter know which people are IS fighters?
You aren't reading carefully at all. The reporters are quoting Afghan officials. The reporters are quoting American officials. Afghan officials have indicated at least 30 civilians were killed and 40 were injured in an attack that accidentally targeted farmers and laborers. American officials "are working with local officials to determine the facts."
The reporters have not made the claim you are attributing to them.
> The idea the United States might accidentally kill some civilians is somehow morally outrageous, but the regular and deliberate targeting of civilians by the Taliban and the IS as they attempt to completely destabilize the Afghan government is taken as somehow normal?
That's a strawman, and you ought to avoid that sort of thing. (edit: although you've suckered some people into arguing about it. kudos!)
I think Reuters is generally a reliable source, but I agree with your double standard points.
This was a horrible accident, but you have to realize there are probably some very bad people they intended to target and the US doesn't blow up random Afghan farmers for fun and games.
HN is quite the liberal community so I'm not surprised if some of the posters here think the Trump administration is more evil than the people who want to blow up the Great Satan.
Can someone explain to me how the US military is still unable to distinguish pine nut farmers from IS Jihadi terrorists? Where is all this advanced military tech I keep hearing the US military is developing that people are mistaking for aliens?
Yes, someone can but you'll need security clearance for that.
If we assume this was not intentional, then the two most probable causes are human or technical or any combination of both.
A drone can't land, open Skype and allow an interrogator to speak with the locals in their language- it flies high, have limited visibility and the interpretation of the incoming data is based on prior intelligence.
If you look at the pictures you'll see that pine nut farmers looks the same as IS Jihadi terrorists, both use civilian clothes and sometimes they are actually the same person.
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.
Also stories like this will be passed down for generations to recruit new jihadists/terrorists. They use this stuff as proof that the USA is anti-muslim or to prove that there is a war against muslims going on. You simply cannot bomb your way out of resolving the terrorism issue. This will probably have the same effectiveness as the war on drugs: lots of money spent....little to no impact on drug smuggling/drug abuse etc.
Comparing the reactions between this (seemlingly little) reported incident, and the attack on Saudi oil facilites (zero fatalities) is an interesting exercise.
_What USA does_ is terrorism. When you drop bombs on people out of nowhere, that's called terrorism. Sorry if you're an American but you've got some learning to do about the biggest terrorist organization in the world before calling others a terrorist. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRbnPA3fd5U
Why not just kill those children and friends then, since we have reasonable expectation that they will become radicalized? We already extensively kill the family and children of terrorists
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?
No it's not. These types of comments are extremely inappropriate. Your comment tries to suggest that:
1. Terrorists are people with legitimate grievances
2. Terrorists are representatives of oppressed people
3. Terrorists have genuine reasons for their actions
All of these things are false. People do not turn into international, careless murderers just because they experience travesty. Terrorists exploit this concept to try to give themselves legitimacy, but the reality is that it's highly removed from the actual reality of what's happening.
You know what does create terrorists though?
1. Sanctions and
2. Funding of militias.
These are things that everyone - except for isolationists - stand behind and support.
----
Thanks for the 5 downvotes in 10 minutes! Feel free to help me (someone from the region who was directly caught up in not one but two American wars) understand why I should be a terrorist now. I'll also forward the comments to my cousin who was working inside a Red Cross clinic hit by a US airstrike so she also knows what to think. Thanks in advance HN!
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 occurred in France, four in the United Kingdom, four in the Netherlands, two in Germany and one each in Belgium, Italy, Spain and Sweden. In 2017, a total of 62 people were killed in ten completed jihadist attacks in the European Union, according to Europol figures. The number of attempted jihadist attacks reached 33 in 2017.
If a single drone strike is how you create terrorists, what is being created in Europe?
Would be really so unthinkable a high army charge going to the area to make in place a public televised apology to those people, asking how can help alleviate this disaster, and returning the families a little dignity at least?
And please journalists, stop referring to the people as "tribal this" or "tribal that". To always focus on that point is unnecessary and disrespective. A father is a father in any part of the world.
On a side note it's very interesting to re-watch Rambo III, where he teams up with local jihadists in Afghanistan to fight the occupying Soviets in the area. Hollywood propaganda at its finest, but brutally ironic today.
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.
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.
1. So the CIA can smuggle heroin to big pharma, and fund black projects. (largely unsubstantiated position)
2. To occupy overland energy routes, disrupting the ability of China to build infrastructure linking to Iran. The whole One Belt/One Road thing is intended to construct an alternative to China's very vulnerable maritime lines of communication, reducing the risk of a resource import blockade by the US Navy. They can't get a oil or gas pipeline from Iran if the A-stan government is in the back pocket of the US, and US military bases sit astride the route.
3. To present the risk of a 2nd front (1st front = Iraq, Persian Gulf), boxing in Iran. Not a major jump-off point for a land invasion (due to logistical constraints) but could serve as basing for aviation assets and special operations raids into the parts of Iran on the eastern side of the Zagros Mountains.
Personally, I don't think any of those reasons is valid for staying there.
>>>What’s the threat, again? I forgot.
Basically we've spent decades playing whack-a-mole, attacking symptoms instead of root causes. And one of those root causes is....our mole-whacking kills far too many innocent civilians.
Just keep bombing somewhat random people, year in and year out. Are we at the 2nd decade of this yet?
This way I promise no one will join the rebells. Why would anyone join the rebells just because their families are slaughtered? That's absurd.
(Irony.)
There comes a time when YOU would strap on a bomb belt. Just imagine that They killed half your family and then goes on telling you they will continue doing it...
> There comes a time when YOU would strap on a bomb belt. Just imagine that They killed half your family and then goes on telling you they will continue doing it...
It's not that hard to imagine - after 9/11, people did enlist themselves to go and start shooting at others, sometimes with the consequence of dying themselves, believing it is for the greater good.
> There comes a time when YOU would strap on a bomb belt. Just imagine that They killed half your family and then goes on telling you they will continue doing it...
I don't think this is quite enough to push people over the ledge. If what killed half my family is someone who does not try to justify his actions morally, someone who I can therefore morally compare to a tiger or bear, I wouldn't strap on a bomb belt. But if the killer tries to tell the world he's eradicating evil, and the world high five with them, ...
The site doesn’t differentiate between terrorists and civilians killed, so I don’t get the point? It’s not like Pakistan is running low on terrorists or the state intelligence service ISI isn’t sponsoring their activities.
> JALALABAD, Afghanistan (Reuters) - A U.S. drone strike intended to hit an Islamic State (IS) hideout in Afghanistan killed at least 30 civilians resting after a day’s labor in the fields, officials said on Thursday.
Officials here seems to refer to unnamed tribal “officials.” The US and Afghan defense ministry officials cited a few paragraphs before that did not say anything about civilian casualties.
I think Americans we are about numb to these headlines as another mass shooting compared that to the reaction of civil society in Germany when a SUV "only" killed 4 people in Berlin.
It would be an interesting experiment for the US military to try stop killing people. It would mean that if you say had a bunch of ISIS guys going to kill civilians like they did in Iraq you'd have to find a non lethal way of stopping them like drones with tasers or maybe diplomacy / bribery. It would be an interesting tech challenge to make non lethal AI drones say that could stop a traditional military.
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 those nut pickers were the bad guys (when in fact they weren’t): was it a manual recognition task? An automatic one? (i.e. image recognition).
Again, this pretty much looks like a false positive issue with great “chances” of having been caused by an automatic process, so it definitely has its place on HN.
Maybe it's just rose colored glasses, but I used HN a few years ago, left and then returned recently. It seems when I was first using it, political stuff in general was discouraged and shut down pretty quickly than now, but of course, my initial sentence applies.
Technology has consequences that are ethical issues because it has influence on the lives of real people.
If you create a technology that is used to abuse other people(like facebook spying or manipulating masses or the military invading other countries), you are responsible for it.
The quality of HN improves if the human side of technology and science is openly discussed.
If a drone kills 30 people it is not "porn". It is a very serious matter.
Would you call it outrage porn if those 30 people were from your family?
Only the government has the right to produce pesto. You cannot store pesto in a bank safety deposit box (in fact, all safety deposit boxes will be banned). You cannot enter or leave the country with more than 10,000 paper promises of pesto. Anyone who buys, or sells, or consumes pesto will be tracked, and suspicious patterns will be assigned to their Social Pesto Score.
The rule of Civil Pesto Forfeiture: the police assume anyone in possession of pesto is engaging in criminal activity. The pesto will be confiscated without any charge, and the onus will be on the pesto owner to litigate to prove that the pesto was obtained legally.
Food banks will charge a fee for dispensing or receiving pesto. Storage of pesto at a food bank will require a negative interest fee.
Futures trading in precious metals for pesto does not need any store of physical metals. Any trade in precious metals for pesto is legally regulated by the Federal Government, but those laws will not actually be enforced.
Pesto lost in boating accidents will be assumed to be still in the owners possession for tax purposes.
The government reserves the right to create as much pesto as necessary for the culinary welfare of the nation. The government decrees that the supply of pesto shall be 2% more than is normally consumed. The excess of pesto will result in too much pesto being included for normal baking transactions, and the value of pesto stored under the mattress will decline.
The production and use of crypto-pesto will be studied by the government in a slightly perplexed manner. For the moment, they do not understand why anyone would want to buy crypto-pesto that cannot be eaten with physical pasta.
All transactions on the condimentchain will be monitored by the government. Eventually they will ban crypto-pesto, because they still don't understand it, but they suspect it threatens their monopoly on printing pesto promises.
torstenvl|6 years ago
I also wish news sources would be more careful about suggesting that there are autonomous killer robots in the sky. The drone didn't target anything. A remote pilot did, based on information he/she was provided.
tehjoker|6 years ago
hyperdunc|6 years ago
Truck attacks, drone attacks, knife attacks - one might be forgiven for thinking these objects have developed minds of their own.
Or perhaps the insinuation is that most humans themselves are mere instruments of the cultures and institutions they're embedded in.
Phillips126|6 years ago
wruza|6 years ago
dominicr|6 years ago
sneak|6 years ago
Why these mass murderers are allowed to flourish in our society is a continuing source of dismay for me.
zupzupzup|6 years ago
est|6 years ago
FTFY
whiddershins|6 years ago
“France knowingly harbors 911 terrorists.”
“French leaders take credit for car bombing which kills 23 civilians.”
There’s a historical reason for this discrepancy.
rayiner|6 years ago
We don’t conduct missions in Afghanistan for funsies. We do it because there is no State we can lean on to stamp down on the extremists.
olliej|6 years ago
unknown|6 years ago
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mieseratte|6 years ago
zxcvbn4038|6 years ago
TeMPOraL|6 years ago
hailwren|6 years ago
Here's the relevant U.S. quote, "U.S. forces conducted a drone strike..." the subject is clear and there is no equivocating about who was responsible for the drone strike.
danbruc|6 years ago
throw7u6548|6 years ago
> In 2014, former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden said in a public debate, “We kill people based on metadata.”
> According to multiple reports and leaks, death-by-metadata could be triggered, without even knowing the target’s name, if too many derogatory checks appear on their profile. “Armed military aged males” exhibiting suspicious behavior in the wrong place can become targets, as can someone “seen to be giving out orders.” Such mathematics-based assassinations have come to be known as “signature strikes.”
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/how-...
justin66|6 years ago
Fair enough, but I would not read too much into that choice of words. For example:
“The workers had lit a bonfire and were sitting together when a drone targeted them,” tribal elder Malik Rahat Gul told Reuters by telephone from Wazir Tangi.
I don't believe that Malik Rahat Gul (or possibly, his translator) was attempting to relieve anyone of moral agency or responsibility, do you?
igravious|6 years ago
stunt|6 years ago
darkr|6 years ago
His films should be interpreted as you might interpret a Malcolm Gladwell book: An entertaining, insightful, witty, and educational way of telling a story that the author wants to tell, supported by hand-picked facts and part-truths, whilst ignoring other information that might reveal a more well-rounded story.
whiddershins|6 years ago
How exactly does the reporter know which people are IS fighters? Is there some notion that militants don’t ever also farm?
Also in these comments there seems to be a huge double standard. The idea the United States might accidentally kill some civilians is somehow morally outrageous, but the regular and deliberate targeting of civilians by the Taliban and the IS as they attempt to completely destabilize the Afghan government is taken as somehow normal?
TeMPOraL|6 years ago
The article says it explicitly: the information is sourced from Afghan officials.
You could say that this may not be the most trustworthy source in this case, and I'd agree, but on the other hand, the problem of mounting civilian casualties of US drone strikes is already a decade if not more old, was widely reported on a few years ago, and is continuously being investigated by various organizations. If what Afghan officials are saying is true, it would not the least bit surprising - and that fact is a huge problem.
> Also in these comments there seems to be a huge double standard. The idea the United States might accidentally kill some civilians is somehow morally outrageous, but the regular and deliberate targeting of civilians by the Taliban and the IS as they attempt to completely destabilize the Afghan government is taken as somehow normal?
I think no one in their right mind would say that what the ISIS or other terrorist groups are doing is anything but repugnant. They're doing evil things, that's a baseline fact, so it's unmentioned - there's nothing interesting in pointing this out. What's more interesting is where did ISIS come from and why are they doing what they're doing, and a significant part of the answer to that question is American military excursions and regular, continued murder of civilians using remote-piloted drones. ISIS may be monsters, but the US is supposed to hold itself to higher standards, not step down to the same level.
frobozz|6 years ago
It is taken as normal that the "Bad Guys" are "Bad". When they do "Bad Guy Stuff", it is further justification for the "Good Guys" continuing to target them. "Normal" does not mean "OK", it just means that it is what is expected - "Bad Guys are Bad" is not news.
It is morally outrageous when the "Good Guys" do "Bad Guy Stuff", because it calls into question the whole "We are good, they are bad" story that the "Good folk at home" are told. How can we be the "Good Guys" if we are killing innocents?
It also reinforces the "We are good, they are bad" story that the "Bad Guys" are selling their folk at home. When the "Great Satan" kills your innocent friends and family when they are at work picking pine nuts, or at a wedding, it becomes easier to encourage you to take up arms against them.
gldalmaso|6 years ago
In fact it really doesn't matter how we see it, but how they see it.
Every strike has a chance of producing more rebels than they kill and I have a hard time thinking the arms industry doesn't also believe that.
rayiner|6 years ago
zapnuk|6 years ago
But you are correct, killing civilians with drones isn't much different compared to other acts of terror.
_yimj|6 years ago
To your point, typically the casualty verification (which UNAMA is tasked with) takes a very long time. Here's an example of three UNAMA reports stating three widely different casualty figures for aerial operations in 2011:
- 2011 report: deaths and injuries at 305 (pg 24)
- 2012 report: deaths and injuries at 353 (pg 31)
- 2014 report: deaths and injuries at 415 (pg 94)
These reports were released years apart and reflect revised figures for 2011. It simply takes that long to verify accounts and corroborate reports, reconcile conflicting information. It will take years to get a definitive confirmation for this incident.
Here's something seen in the UNAMA reports that's more harrowing than drone weapon releases mentioned in the article. When a drone operator merely reports activity, a typical response to it is that the local forces send out a team to investigate the location. They do this at night. Vehicles pull up, spotlights come on and distorted loudspeakers come on shouting screams at people to stay inside and wait. Disoriented and confused civilians, trying to make sense of the noise, do what any normal human beings do, which is go outside to see what this is all about. At that point, even children get shot because they're contravening instructions. They become a number in a report.
This is death by process.
esailija|6 years ago
Guilty until proven innocent, right?
justin66|6 years ago
> How exactly does the reporter know which people are IS fighters?
You aren't reading carefully at all. The reporters are quoting Afghan officials. The reporters are quoting American officials. Afghan officials have indicated at least 30 civilians were killed and 40 were injured in an attack that accidentally targeted farmers and laborers. American officials "are working with local officials to determine the facts."
The reporters have not made the claim you are attributing to them.
> The idea the United States might accidentally kill some civilians is somehow morally outrageous, but the regular and deliberate targeting of civilians by the Taliban and the IS as they attempt to completely destabilize the Afghan government is taken as somehow normal?
That's a strawman, and you ought to avoid that sort of thing. (edit: although you've suckered some people into arguing about it. kudos!)
mikeash|6 years ago
vonseel|6 years ago
This was a horrible accident, but you have to realize there are probably some very bad people they intended to target and the US doesn't blow up random Afghan farmers for fun and games.
HN is quite the liberal community so I'm not surprised if some of the posters here think the Trump administration is more evil than the people who want to blow up the Great Satan.
stargazing|6 years ago
2rsf|6 years ago
If we assume this was not intentional, then the two most probable causes are human or technical or any combination of both.
A drone can't land, open Skype and allow an interrogator to speak with the locals in their language- it flies high, have limited visibility and the interpretation of the incoming data is based on prior intelligence.
If you look at the pictures you'll see that pine nut farmers looks the same as IS Jihadi terrorists, both use civilian clothes and sometimes they are actually the same person.
hatchershoes|6 years ago
gcatalfamo|6 years ago
newguy1234|6 years ago
divbyzer0|6 years ago
edit: added word 'Saudi'
alpb|6 years ago
Um no, you are wrong.
_What USA does_ is terrorism. When you drop bombs on people out of nowhere, that's called terrorism. Sorry if you're an American but you've got some learning to do about the biggest terrorist organization in the world before calling others a terrorist. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRbnPA3fd5U
chooseaname|6 years ago
Which the war machine needs in order to grow.
Which the politicians need in order to get elected (Some people want "strong" leaders, for this definition of strong).
ageofwant|6 years ago
unknown|6 years ago
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lawn|6 years ago
dep_b|6 years ago
benjaminbrodie2|6 years ago
oh_sigh|6 years ago
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?
stevenjohns|6 years ago
1. Terrorists are people with legitimate grievances
2. Terrorists are representatives of oppressed people
3. Terrorists have genuine reasons for their actions
All of these things are false. People do not turn into international, careless murderers just because they experience travesty. Terrorists exploit this concept to try to give themselves legitimacy, but the reality is that it's highly removed from the actual reality of what's happening.
You know what does create terrorists though?
1. Sanctions and
2. Funding of militias.
These are things that everyone - except for isolationists - stand behind and support.
----
Thanks for the 5 downvotes in 10 minutes! Feel free to help me (someone from the region who was directly caught up in not one but two American wars) understand why I should be a terrorist now. I'll also forward the comments to my cousin who was working inside a Red Cross clinic hit by a US airstrike so she also knows what to think. Thanks in advance HN!
draugadrotten|6 years ago
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 occurred in France, four in the United Kingdom, four in the Netherlands, two in Germany and one each in Belgium, Italy, Spain and Sweden. In 2017, a total of 62 people were killed in ten completed jihadist attacks in the European Union, according to Europol figures. The number of attempted jihadist attacks reached 33 in 2017.
If a single drone strike is how you create terrorists, what is being created in Europe?
pvaldes|6 years ago
And please journalists, stop referring to the people as "tribal this" or "tribal that". To always focus on that point is unnecessary and disrespective. A father is a father in any part of the world.
pgreenwood|6 years ago
petre|6 years ago
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...
techsin101|6 years ago
Roboprog|6 years ago
What’s the threat, again? I forgot.
CapricornNoble|6 years ago
1. So the CIA can smuggle heroin to big pharma, and fund black projects. (largely unsubstantiated position)
2. To occupy overland energy routes, disrupting the ability of China to build infrastructure linking to Iran. The whole One Belt/One Road thing is intended to construct an alternative to China's very vulnerable maritime lines of communication, reducing the risk of a resource import blockade by the US Navy. They can't get a oil or gas pipeline from Iran if the A-stan government is in the back pocket of the US, and US military bases sit astride the route.
3. To present the risk of a 2nd front (1st front = Iraq, Persian Gulf), boxing in Iran. Not a major jump-off point for a land invasion (due to logistical constraints) but could serve as basing for aviation assets and special operations raids into the parts of Iran on the eastern side of the Zagros Mountains.
Personally, I don't think any of those reasons is valid for staying there.
>>>What’s the threat, again? I forgot.
Basically we've spent decades playing whack-a-mole, attacking symptoms instead of root causes. And one of those root causes is....our mole-whacking kills far too many innocent civilians.
discordance|6 years ago
unknown|6 years ago
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whiddershins|6 years ago
derpherpsson|6 years ago
This way I promise no one will join the rebells. Why would anyone join the rebells just because their families are slaughtered? That's absurd.
(Irony.)
There comes a time when YOU would strap on a bomb belt. Just imagine that They killed half your family and then goes on telling you they will continue doing it...
mikejb|6 years ago
It's not that hard to imagine - after 9/11, people did enlist themselves to go and start shooting at others, sometimes with the consequence of dying themselves, believing it is for the greater good.
benjaminbrodie2|6 years ago
I don't think this is quite enough to push people over the ledge. If what killed half my family is someone who does not try to justify his actions morally, someone who I can therefore morally compare to a tiger or bear, I wouldn't strap on a bomb belt. But if the killer tries to tell the world he's eradicating evil, and the world high five with them, ...
richardw|6 years ago
randunel|6 years ago
FTFY
amingilani|6 years ago
I posted this site a few years ago, but it didn't get attention, but I'm glad to see the community is finally outraged over drone strikes.
[0]: http://pakistanbodycount.org/
waffle_ss|6 years ago
rayiner|6 years ago
> JALALABAD, Afghanistan (Reuters) - A U.S. drone strike intended to hit an Islamic State (IS) hideout in Afghanistan killed at least 30 civilians resting after a day’s labor in the fields, officials said on Thursday.
Officials here seems to refer to unnamed tribal “officials.” The US and Afghan defense ministry officials cited a few paragraphs before that did not say anything about civilian casualties.
coldtea|6 years ago
mothsonasloth|6 years ago
The Mongols tried and failed.
The Arabs tried and failed.
The Mughals tried and failed.
The British tried and failed.
The Soviets tried and failed.
NATO tried and......
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasions_of_Afghanistan
tibbydudeza|6 years ago
tim333|6 years ago
Or maybe like the non lethal terminator in Terminator 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3XJxWwYx58
mikelyons|6 years ago
nullc|6 years ago
rikelmens|6 years ago
newnewpdro|6 years ago
alkibiades|6 years ago
pvaldes|6 years ago
concordDance|6 years ago
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?).
paganel|6 years ago
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 those nut pickers were the bad guys (when in fact they weren’t): was it a manual recognition task? An automatic one? (i.e. image recognition).
Again, this pretty much looks like a false positive issue with great “chances” of having been caused by an automatic process, so it definitely has its place on HN.
non-entity|6 years ago
hevi_jos|6 years ago
Technology has consequences that are ethical issues because it has influence on the lives of real people.
If you create a technology that is used to abuse other people(like facebook spying or manipulating masses or the military invading other countries), you are responsible for it.
The quality of HN improves if the human side of technology and science is openly discussed.
If a drone kills 30 people it is not "porn". It is a very serious matter.
Would you call it outrage porn if those 30 people were from your family?
aedron|6 years ago
ArtRichards|6 years ago
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malicioususer11|6 years ago
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zed88|6 years ago
mikhailfranco|6 years ago
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mikhailfranco|6 years ago
Only the government has the right to produce pesto. You cannot store pesto in a bank safety deposit box (in fact, all safety deposit boxes will be banned). You cannot enter or leave the country with more than 10,000 paper promises of pesto. Anyone who buys, or sells, or consumes pesto will be tracked, and suspicious patterns will be assigned to their Social Pesto Score.
The rule of Civil Pesto Forfeiture: the police assume anyone in possession of pesto is engaging in criminal activity. The pesto will be confiscated without any charge, and the onus will be on the pesto owner to litigate to prove that the pesto was obtained legally.
Food banks will charge a fee for dispensing or receiving pesto. Storage of pesto at a food bank will require a negative interest fee.
Futures trading in precious metals for pesto does not need any store of physical metals. Any trade in precious metals for pesto is legally regulated by the Federal Government, but those laws will not actually be enforced.
Pesto lost in boating accidents will be assumed to be still in the owners possession for tax purposes.
The government reserves the right to create as much pesto as necessary for the culinary welfare of the nation. The government decrees that the supply of pesto shall be 2% more than is normally consumed. The excess of pesto will result in too much pesto being included for normal baking transactions, and the value of pesto stored under the mattress will decline.
The production and use of crypto-pesto will be studied by the government in a slightly perplexed manner. For the moment, they do not understand why anyone would want to buy crypto-pesto that cannot be eaten with physical pasta.
All transactions on the condimentchain will be monitored by the government. Eventually they will ban crypto-pesto, because they still don't understand it, but they suspect it threatens their monopoly on printing pesto promises.
unknown|6 years ago
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kome|6 years ago
Yankee go home.
dkraft|6 years ago