Highly condemnable

A full day after a missile strike on Pakistan, a bungled attempt to assassinate Ayman al-Zawahiri, resulting in the deaths of something like 18 Pakistanis, the US has yet to acknowledge that those were its drone planes and its missiles (indeed, the first reaction was to deny it) and explain why it committed an act of war against a supposed ally, the second airstrike inside Pakistan in a week. Of course it wasn’t technically an act of war against Pakistan because the US had Musharaf’s permission. Musharaf won’t admit that, of course, so he has to pretend to be outraged; a government statement called the attack “highly condemnable.” Considering how much pretending to be outraged people like Musharaf have to do, you’d think they’d be better at it, if not actually convincing. Musharaf diluted his faux outrage even further by blaming the victims for the missile strike on their village: “If we kept sheltering foreign terrorists here... our future will not be good.” That will look really good on 18 head-stones, although it may not fit on the child-sized ones. That’s assuming the authorities give back the bodies they seized for the FBI to perform DNA tests on.



Of course for some people, the real crime isn’t the 18 or more dead, but the singeing of a Koran.