A teenager caught on a lethal mission reveals how he was groomed to kill British troops. In The Independent, Kim Sengupta reports from Kabul:
The surroundings were grim and forbidding, a notorious jail run by Afghanistan’s feared security service for those taken prisoner in the bloody war with the Taliban.
Among the inmates: Shakirullah Yasin Ali; a small, frail boy, just 14 years old, arrested as he prepared to carry out a suicide bombing against British and American targets. “If I had succeeded, I would be dead now, I realise that,” he said in a soft, nervous voice.
“But those who were instructing me said that if I believed in serving God it was my duty to fight against the foreigners. They said God would protect me when the time came.”
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Pervez Hoodbhoy, professor of nuclear physics at the Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad, in The Times of India:
A drone is a semi-autonomous, self-propelled system controlled by an external intelligence. Suitably equipped handlers guide it towards an assigned target. The MQ-1B General Dynamics Predator, connected to high-flying US military surveillance satellites, differs from the low-tech mullah-trained human drone produced in Pakistani madrassas. But they share a common characteristic. Neither asks why they must kill.
Drones, machine and human, have drenched Pakistan with the blood of innocents. In 2006, a bevy of MQ-1Bs hovering over Damadola launched a barrage of 10 Hellfire missiles, costing $60,000 apiece, at the village below. They blew up 18 local people, including five women and five children. The blame was put on faulty local intelligence. The same year, a Hellfire missile hit a madrassa in Bajaur killing between 80 and 85 people, mostly students. Pervez Musharraf’s credibility stood so low that few believed his claim that those killed were training to become Al-Qaida militants. Indeed, while these space-age weapons have occasionally eliminated a few Al-Qaida men, such as Abu Laith al-Libi in January 2008, the more usual outcome has been flattened houses, dead and maimed children, and a growing tribal population that seeks revenge against Pakistan and the US.
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