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Originally posted by Toramana
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If you mean by your leaders - then you are either joking or lying since they were the biggest proponents of interventionalism by way of drones.
Regarding Karak and Bannu, I would be careful dismissing their Pashtun identity since Wazir and Khattak tribesman have migrated back and forth to pasture lands in these areas. During the British era conflageration Wazir tribal maliks receded into Bannu when they needed to.
Regarding my sympathies and regarding yours - Let me give you a misaal. There are physicians and there are quacks. The former is diagnostician, and the latter is an alchemist at best. In some poor areas of Pashtun lands there are people who hand out tawizoona for cleft lip and things that the evidence based person will know full well cannot treat the cleft lip. The Quack may himself even believe in his power of taweez, or he may have a subspecialty in snake oil selling. Either way, one sees aright and the other is wrong.
Let me show you how the world is interpreting your brand of quackery in recent years. There is a group of you I have been watching for some time now and enjoyed debunking: Farhat Taj Anderson, mentally handicapped Muhammad Taqi, Khadim Hussein etc on the one side of the border and clowns like Ahmad Shuja on the other. Each of you has their own personal agenda and has formed failed "think-thanks" as fronts for peddling your nonsense to the world regarding cause and effect.
Let us see what the latest commentary on the now defunct AIRRA has been:
A small section of the Pakistani intelligentsia, mainly writing for the English language press, approves of the drone attacks. These are the only voices that the western media generally picks up. Their support is predicated on the drones' supposed accuracy and popularity. All these claims, without exception, rely on a single source: the Aryana Institute for Regional Research and Advocacy, a letter head organization of dubious provenance. Its public face, Farhat Taj, is a zany middle-aged graduate student with a reputation for preposterous claims based on unnamed – many suspect invented – interlocutors. But neither the source's credibility nor common sense has proved a barrier to Pakistan's liberal hawks invoking its authority to support their calls for greater violence.
Irfan Husain, a columnist for Dawn, makes a case for 'more drone attacks, not less.' Husain (who once served on the advisory board of an Israel lobby astroturf operation campaigning for the normalization of relations between Pakistan and Israel) bases his claim on the pronouncements of 'Dr Farhat Taj'. (The curious elevation of Taj's status to 'Dr' suggests that Husain is aware he is skating on thin ice.) He quotes her as saying that the 'ordinary people in FATA are delighted' by and 'feel comfortable with the drone attacks'. 'They would welcome anyone,' she adds, 'Americans, Israelis, Indians or even the devil to rid them of the Taliban and Al Qaeda.' To Husain, this 'makes perfect sense'. And sceptics -- such as the media, Imran Khan, or two-thirds of the Pakistani public -- are on the other hand merely 'acting as cheerleaders for these terrorists.'
Irfan Husain, a columnist for Dawn, makes a case for 'more drone attacks, not less.' Husain (who once served on the advisory board of an Israel lobby astroturf operation campaigning for the normalization of relations between Pakistan and Israel) bases his claim on the pronouncements of 'Dr Farhat Taj'. (The curious elevation of Taj's status to 'Dr' suggests that Husain is aware he is skating on thin ice.) He quotes her as saying that the 'ordinary people in FATA are delighted' by and 'feel comfortable with the drone attacks'. 'They would welcome anyone,' she adds, 'Americans, Israelis, Indians or even the devil to rid them of the Taliban and Al Qaeda.' To Husain, this 'makes perfect sense'. And sceptics -- such as the media, Imran Khan, or two-thirds of the Pakistani public -- are on the other hand merely 'acting as cheerleaders for these terrorists.'
As a matter of fact, the only known survey "on the ground in FATA" at the time was carried out by a "letterhead organisation" named the Aryana Institute for Regional Research and Advocacy whose conclusions can fairly be described as deeply unreliable and dubious. It claimed that 55 per cent of respondents in a survey it carried out in "parts of FATA that are often hit by American drones" (among which it curiously included Parachinar, which has never been hit and whose overwhelmingly Shia population is deeply hostile to the virulently anti-Shia Taliban) did not think that the attacks caused "fear and terror in the common people"; 52 per cent found them "accurate in their strikes"; and 58 per cent did not think they increased anti-Americanism.
Your cabal has generated a series of half truths that generally apply better to your selves than anyone else and has generated more radicalism due to mis-steps being taken from your advice then any madrassah in existence. These are namely:
1) Local Muslim populations in neocolonialized nations have little regard for their own religion, but the West out of thin air, created religious movements to make sure that these nations would not become bastions of Hollywood and the brothels you think they ought to be.
2) Radicalism is the cause and not the effect as if, for instance, the radicals had any hold on society before your brand of Soviet interventionists entered Afghanistan. You rarely read the ground level data or the words of any and all parties to see what the actual gripes and motivations are for radicalization - instead you throw fuel on the fire.
3) The language of resistance, which often is clothed in the language of religion in the middle east and in south and central Asia is Arabization.
Not an iota of proof exists to buttress these claims and the fact that "evidence" has to be generated or biased to produce the desired narrative as we see in the Parachinar example provided above.
For years you and your ilk were shell shocked at the collapse of your prior logic masters and then, like parasites, you quickly hopped onto the back of the master that took down your prior one.
In that bygone anti Soviet era you generated mythology that stated with certainty that resistance fighters and the US had exactly aligned goals, yet when your group benefited and advocated for the drone campaigns that have hit civilians galore you sneered "we take up with wherever the benefit is and of course we will utilize another entities fire power if it suits our needs and so on and so forth." Not realizing that this smashed your illogical claims since your adversary groups did exactly the same thing, but simply did it with greater success than you did.
No no my friend, do not feign support for the Pashtuns of FATA when just years before you were backing a dubious author in her idiotic claims and faulty data to justify the killings that Clive Stafford Smith and others have now validated with hard evidence.
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