The Chronicle Editorial LiveJournalists tried to get all serious today.
They’re REALLY upset about the drone attack on terrorists in Pakistan:
WHEN missiles from an unmanned CIA Predator aircraft slammed into the Pakistani village of Damadola late Friday, they hit precisely the dwellings in which intelligence reports indicated al-Qaida deputy leader Ayman Zawahiri was spending the night. Tragically, the weapons performed their function better than the brains behind them.
Instead of Zawahiri, the explosives landed on innocent villagers, including women and children, whose deaths provoked anti-American demonstrations throughout Pakistan and a diplomatic protest by their government.
Well, that was this morning. As the Chronicle‘s increasingly erratic features editor might say, the story has changed:
Four or five foreign militants were killed in the U.S. airstrikes on the village of Damadola on Friday and 10 to 12 militants were invited to dinner in the village that night, the political administrator of the Bajaur region, where the attacks took place, said in a statement released by the provincial government here Tuesday.
The findings were from a preliminary joint investigation at the scene by government agencies and represent the first official confirmation that militants were among those killed.
As for the diplomatic protest by the Pakistanis — well, that’s great theater, and maybe even necessary to the Pakistan government’s stability — but it’s unlikely that this operation took place without the advance knowledge of Pakistan’s government.
It’s regrettable whenever innocents are killed, no matter how just the war. But Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier is a hotbed of terrorist activity, and even President Musharraf has warned Pakistanis of the potential consequences of harboring terrorists:
President Pervez Musharraf said the day after the strikes that there had been a foreign presence in the village, and he urged the population not to harbor foreign militants because it would not be good for Pakistan’s future.
The Chronicle editorial concludes strangely, with three disjointed paragraphs that ramble on almost nonsensically about Seymour Hersh, Vietnam, and air power in Iraq fueling civil war.
