David Eden

March 3, 2015

English 1000

Journal 2

How the Pakistani people view the drone strikes in the Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA) and if it is in the best interest of their people.

FAIR, C. CHRISTINE, KARL KALTENTHALER, and WILLIAM J. MILLER. "Pakistani Opposition To American Drone Strikes." Political Science Quarterly (Wiley-Blackwell) 129.1 (2014): 1-33. Academic Search Complete. Web. 3 Mar. 2015.

In this article, Christine Fair talks about the lack of knowledge of the United States involvement, and how the different classes add to the differences in thinking.  Pakistan, like us and like almost every country, has a lower class, middle class, and a higher class, but unlike us, the different classes have different sources of news.  I know that we too have different types of news, like Fox, NBC, or C-SPAN, but in Pakistan, news is  available to people based more on social class.  The poor get relatively no news, and since they make up the majority, have little knowledge of our activities in the Federally Administered Tribal Area or FATA.  The middle class receives news from Urdu, which is largely anti- American and strongly feels that it is the responsibility of the Pakistani government to carry out drone strikes in the FATA.  The upper class, receives its news from English news programs, ones with more national merit, and the viewer favor American drone strikes in the region to help combat attacks.  Since a council of elected members from the tribes controls the FATA, they govern themselves, they control their armies, and they are in control of their own judicial actions, which makes drones strikes a difficult area to work for the US.  And with several political figures like Pakistan’s Foreign Minister, Hina Rabbani Khar, speaking out against the strikes, they could use legal force to get the United States into big trouble.

After reading this article, my thoughts about drone strikes have only been complicated.  There is such a difference in thinking across the spectrum, even with the majority having no clue about what we do, that there will be no way to win in anything that we do.  News sources that the middle class receives is some of the most bias, anti-American news that airs today, and if they people who watch it believe that it’s true, then we are in big trouble.  While we have the support of the higher class who is far more educated and watches English news, the country is too split to make any decisions without major uproar from the opposite side.  So the US has to decide on which side they would rather upset and if they don’t mind pissing off the rest of the country.

If I were to synthesize this article, I would say that Fair would agree with Ahmad in that our drone activities in the FATA are illegal and questionable at best.  Fair says that after many pubic officials denounced the strikes, public uproar followed and if Pakistan wanted to, they could put the US in some legal issues with the UN. 

For my next article, I would like to look into how the FATA is organized, what type of strikes are used in the area, and how strikes affect local perceptions of the US.