We almost seldom, should that be never, hear from the victims of the current wars who still live.
And what we are given are broad generalizations about people. Could it be possible without stereotypes of “enemies” it is not really possible for us to understand human cause and effect?
First hand reports from the tribal areas of Pakistan are relatively rare. The people there never get a chance to speak for themselves. It is interesting to hear what they have to say.
Kathy Kelly reports from Islamabad for Voices for Creative Nonviolence:
The most recent plane to attack the Pakistani village of Khaisor (according to a Waziristan resident who asked me to withhold his name) came twenty days ago, on May 20th, 2009. A U.S. drone airplane fired a missile at the village at 4:30 AM, killing 14 women and children and 2 elders, wounding eleven.
The previous day, some travelers had come to Khaisor, and the villagers had served them a meal. “This is our custom,” my friend relates. “It is our traditional way.” But these travelers were members of the Taliban, and their visit was noted by U.S. forces. It is possible they were identified through pictures taken by unmanned U.S. drones. Although the visitors had left right after their meal, the U.S. responded to this act of hospitality by bombing the homes of the hosts early the following morning.
I asked my friend how families cope, when a bomb suddenly blasts their home in the middle of the night. Do they have any kind of first aid available to help the wounded? “You see this,” he said, pointing to the long shawl that I happened to be wearing, a customary part of every village woman’s dress, “they try to use this [as a bandage] because it is all they have.” I imagined the shawl rapidly soaking up the blood of a dying Pakistani man, woman, or child.
On the morning of the 20th, the other villagers had rushed to the section where the missile had hit, hoisting injured survivors onto their shoulders and carrying them across rough, hilly terrain to the nearest road (about five kilometers away from the village) where, lacking vehicles of their own and with no hope of receiving an ambulance visit, they waited for a car to stop, their only means of reaching a hospital.
The first car they saw did stop, but its driver refused to take any of the wounded for fear that his action would be noted by an unmanned U.S. drone, and that he himself would face the reward for his hospitality which the village had received.
The villagers walked along the road until another car stopped and did agree to take some of the wounded to a nearby center run by the International Commission of the Red Cross.
For three days following the attack, people collected in the village, coming in from all over the region for the funerals. My visitor told me that whether people know the villagers or not, they will come to pray. “On the cell phone you get the word,” he said, “Look, this bloody thing again happened. People share the sorrow, but the anger increases. Everyone says we should get rid of the Americans.”
At Truthdig, William Pfaff argues that the accepted assumptions about various places including Pakistan should be questioned in the light of evidence. He observes:
The first is the revolt of tribesmen against the Taliban in part of Pakistan’s northwest tribal area, including the well-known tourist region of the Swat Valley, where the “students of religion” recently infiltrated and seized power from the Pakistani authorities and police. This provoked alarm there and in the United States that the religious extremists are a menace to Pakistan.
This fear was exaggerated from the start; Pakistan has a serious government and army. Now, popular anger at Taliban abuses and imposition of unacceptable religious and social norms has erupted among tribesmen and traditional leaders. The formation of popular militias has resulted in expulsion of the Taliban from the positions they have taken, while Pakistan’s army has successfully retaken territories further south, at a cost to the population of tens of thousands of refugees. These refugees are a grave problem for a government under stress.
The significance of all this is major: The Taliban with their religious rigor do not automatically win converts among their own people.