Losiing Their Hearts and Minds and Our Souls

Losing Hearts and Minds
I woke up this morning to the main headline in my Washington Post saying "U.S. Strike On Al Queda Top Deputy Said to Fail". I thought, damn. We missed getting that terrorist zealot Ayman Zawahiri. I had briefly heard of the incident the night before while I was watching the football playoffs.

Then I read a bit more and I was horrified. We had not only missed our target, but we had killed seventeen innocent people, including 6 children.

I then thought a bit more...

We're not at war with Pakistan. This was not Afghanistan before the fall of the Taliban. In other words, the seventeen were not unfortunate collateral damage of a specific war.

The location that we hit was not a terrorist camp or a cave hideout, but a Pakistani village. Yes, there are many villages and villagers that are very sympathetic to al Queda and its goals. But this was a village - again, in a country that we are not at war with - and a village that had families, that had chldren, or for that matter full fledged adults that could not in anyway defend themselves from an incoming US missle.

It was also reported that tens of thousands of Pakistanis stageda an angry anti-American protest, shouting "Death to America!" and "Death to Musharraf!" Would we not feel differently in this country?

While it didn't ignore the tragedy, the article seemed to concentrate more on the missed opportunity of killing Zawahiri and the geo-political fallout from the deaths of innoents. The reporters seem to have compiled this article from Kabul, a couple of hundred miles away in Afghanistan.

The only thing I can say in defense of what happened is that apparently the Pakistani intelligence services helped us out in this effort - a sign that we're not just bombing indiscriminately.

But I can't help but think how actions like this wil win over the 'moderate Muslims'.

This is a story that will likely be soon forgotten about by the American media and of course, the American people, as we soon turn to what happened to the next missing attractive woman or we wonder who will capture our collective hearts and be our next "American Idol".