The horror stories of recent U.S. missile strikes against Pakistani villages in the border area with Afghanistan should be carefully examined, with a mind towards eliminating the deaths of innocents in the pursuit of al-Qaeda chiefs.
My starting point for the argument is that unless the heads of al-Qaeda announce an unconditional surrender to be followed by an immediate dismantling of their organization, their assassination is, sadly, a necessary evil.
Notice, I am expressing a lot more humanity towards them than they would express towards me. They do have a Nazistic philosophy. In their view, Islam is the only valid religion and only people who adhere to its most extreme forms are worthy of continuing to live. Everybody else is a heretic who should be killed at once.
And that viewpoint prevents them from living their own lives to the fullest. If the guiding force in one’s life is not love, one is not experiencing life at its most rewarding. And love should radiate from within the individual. Love for oneself should lead to love of one’s fellow and exponentially to love of humanity. What better basis could there be for all of us to live productively and in a worthwhile manner on planet earth? Those who aren’t comfortable with the notion of universal love could at the very least be proponents of universal tolerance of cultural differences.
The only thing that stops Islamic extremists from embracing their Muslim background while also having a tolerant view of other cultures is their own narrow-mindedness. And it is personally saddening to me that a human being would spiritually cripple himself in that manner while also imperiling many innocent people.
Given that I write that way, who can doubt my essential decency?
It profoundly concerns me that CIA drone planes are carrying out strikes in Pakistani villages in an attempt to assassinate al-Qaeda kingpins and that in the process, they kill innocent people.
But a large part of the cause of those strikes is Pakistan’s duplicity in hunting down those al-Qaeda kingpins. Pakistan has not granted American forces in Afghanistan the right to cross the border in pursuit of militants. And those al-Qaeda kingpins are using Pakistan as a refuge.
I know that the Pakistani government has a tough juggling act on its hands with considerable portions of its population sympathetic to al-Qaeda and its aims. But the sheltering of Islamic militants is taking place in its territory, and therefore the Pakistani government should be taking a completely unequivocal stand against those militants, and it should be cooperating 101% in efforts towards their capture. By not giving that level of cooperation, the Pakistani government bears some responsibility for the deaths of innocents in CIA drone plane missile strikes against mountain villages in Pakistan. Those militants really do make and carry out monstrous attacks in which thousands of innocents have been killed, and they can not be allowed to operate freely.