Hearts and Minds, and why you won't win them.

For those of you who have given up following America's folly in the Middle East (and I wouldn't blame you), you may find it mind-numbingly typical if I told you that the US was bombing Pakistan. Not all of it, mind you, just the "lawless" border with Afghanistan.

For a very long time, this region bordering Afghanistan has been a "safe haven" for terrorists operating in Afghanistan. If Afghanistan isn't safe, then the mountainous, cave-filled border region can always be counted on.

Unfortunately for the locals, however, the Americans don't think that Al-Qaeda should be safe anywhere, and so have begun bombing suspected terrorist safe-houses behind the border.

As an unavoidable side effect of this, civilians die. It's inevitable, when you're talking about the kind of explosive power that modern bombs have. Yes, they never miss. You can plant a 500 kilogram bomb at the base of a lamp-post in Baghdad, and yes, the lamp-post will be destroyed. The city block that the lamp-post is in will also be destroyed, but hey, that's collateral damage, right?

People die in these air strikes, and naturally the families and friends of the people that were killed for no reason (or, at least, a very bad reason) start to harbor some disdain for the people that dropped the bombs.

This has happened in every "war" the US has been in since WWII. It happened in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

Now it's happening in Pakistan.

And the response every time was some kind of attempt to "win the hearts and minds of the innocent people of nation X," just like NATO now wants to do in Pakistan. They use food drops, and send soldiers in to talk to village elders, and all that jazz. But it doesn't work, because these people don't want to support a group of other people that could, at any moment, lay waste to their entire livelihood with one, well placed, multi-million dollar weapon of war.

I'm not making this up. It does happen. They've bombed weddings, for Christ's sake!

And yet, in every new war the US stumbles in to, they keep doing the same things over and over again. They use crappy intelligence to find bullshit targets, kill a lot of civilians (displace a hell of a lot more), and then attempt to make up for all of that by apologizing, giving them a food drop, and repeating the same process tomorrow?

Someone once said that the definition of madness was repeating the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result. And boy oh boy, are these people good at that.