STEP INTO OUR SHOES

Pakistani living in the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan. On the edges of the now-infamous federally administered Tribal Area (FATA) and the cloud-capped Hindu Kush mountains. When you read a dog-eared copy of George Orwell’s 1984 in your teens, you thought the story was a piece of clever fiction, a warning of the perils of propaganda. Now you feel like you are living it. The random bombs that blitzed the “proles” in 1984 are now rained down on your village by American drones. You can hear them buzzing in the sky, heard but unseen, a kinetic threat that occasionally delivers a lethal payload against an unsuspecting neighbor. You understand your government’s hesitance to attack its own people at America’s behest. You understand the comic futility of trying to police the Afpak border, despite U.S. insistence that your country do so. And you wonder, now that they’ve got bin Laden, why don’t they just go away?

If you were a Pakistani, would you condone the drone? Would you support the War on Terror, that state-led violence against stateless actors hiding in remote hamlets? Shouldn't this be police work, you wonder? Isn't there a more effective means of capturing civilian criminals than aerial assaults managed remotely by brainwashed conscripts in air-conditioned bunkers deep in the American desert—the gamification of warfare has finally arrived? But you recognize the political dynamic in play: To the West, the lives of American soldiers have higher value than the lives of anonymous Arabs and Persians in some far-flung dystopia. The American President must limit American casualties even as he corrals the metastasizing army of madman in yet another failed state.

These questions are surprisingly easy to answer when you put yourself in our shoes. You discover that, quite possibly, we people are lot like like you. We want peace, we want prosperity, we want to feed our families and have weekends free. One characteristic of people everywhere is a desire not to be bombed. Another is and that, pushed into a corner, they will defend their own. Shouldn’t these basic observations be central to our understanding of the world, instead of the incessant drone of media punditry that tries to dehumanize the weak and poor and voiceless?