But while I figured bad publicity would turn the Pakistani people against us even more and pressure the government to halt their secret cooperation, that hasn't happened. The Pakistani government has been pretty firm on keeping the strikes going.
This article says the strikes are radicalizing Pakistanis:
The Sabaoon School for boys in northern Pakistan is anything but average. ...
The boys here, aged 8 to 18, were all militants at some point. Some are killers, some helped build and plant improvised explosive devices, and others were destined to be suicide bombers until they were captured or turned over to the Pakistani army. All of them are at the school to be de-radicalized.
Ninety-nine percent of the boys, I am told, have never heard of Osama bin Laden, despite the fact he was killed by U.S. Navy SEALs in the next valley over from here. What has radicalized these boys instead, the school's director says, is what turns teenagers the world over to crime: poverty, poor education, limited prospects and often lack of parental control.
This should be a convenient point to say "I told you so," and darn President Obama for this result, while I'm at it. Heck, I could gloat that the jihadis have a short memory if they can't work up a little outrage over the war in Iraq. We haven't been gone that long, have we?
But like every little thing we do that supposedly causes radicals to strap on the suicide bomb vest, I have to reply: nice try.
Long before we put the first missile on a drone, Pakistanis and other Moslems were somehow being persuaded to join the jihad. Somehow, the jihadis always manage to find some outrage to rile up the criminally stupid. Drone strikes. Iraq. Britney Spears' navel. Global warming. Whatever. Amazingly enough, sometimes what riles them up isn't even about America! Ask the Indians about that, eh?
So I don't care if every friggin' idiot in Pakistan says that killing jihadis makes them want to become a jihadi. Normal people don't react to even outrages by concluding that killing any civilian of the designated religious persuasion is the logical response. Even after seeing Americans leaping from the World Trade Center in 2001, I didn't think, "I want to walk into a mosque and kill random Moslems by detonating a grenade that I'll hold in my hand." Odd, isn't it, that I didn't have a natural reaction like that? Even after seeing bombs go off at the Boston Marathon?
The problem of hopped up jihadi wannabees predated President Obama. So I won't blame his drone strikes for causing jihadi recruiting. The problem pre-dated President Bush, who didn't create jihadis by fighting in Afghanistan, fighting in Iraq, or just having an annoying Texas twang. Good people don't rip other people's arms off:
Personally, rather than focus on goodness lessons, I'd show those boys video after video of missiles coming down on cross-haired jihadis while they are in convoys, jihadis having lunch, jihadis sleeping, jihadis sitting around the campfire discussing the best ways to slit Infidel throats, etc. Let's give them fear and futility lessons.
And collect DNA samples from each of them, explaining that this is the best way to identify the very scattered remains of jihadis caught by one of our drone strikes.
The jihadi problem has been around many centuries, truth be told. So I'm not going to condemn the Obama administration for creating jihadis. We are unfortunate enough to be living in a period of maximum jihadi looniness coming out of the Moslem world. Pretty much anything we do--or anything we don't do--can be used to recruit the idiots who flock to the black banner of al Qaeda. I think even President Obama understands this reality now. Which is why outreach to the Moslem world is now done with armed drones seeking out the most disturbed recruits who join the jihad.
