Pakistan Being Disagreeable

According to Reuters News, American and Pakistani officials had a nice meeting while President Obama was in Turkey, which I think was coincidence, and agreed on quite a few things but not on the issue of us firing Hellfire missiles into their villages from pilotless drones. It seems they do not think we should be doing that and we will not agree to stop. The fact that it is their country we are shooting the missiles into makes them think it is their issue to decide. The fact that we have the missiles and drones makes us think it is our issue to decide.

They use the tired old "national sovereignty" argument. We say that we might be aiming at somebody that might be planning to maybe harm us and we might hit what we are aiming at.

If we make a mistake and aim at the wrong people, or if we aim at the right people and miss, or if we hit the right people and blast damage kills some innocent citizens who just happened to be hanging out in the neighborhood, then it's a case of, "Oops, our bad."

I wonder if the parties would use the same arguments if it was them shooting Hellfire missiles into, say, Alabama. Our government would bless their efforts with, "Well, go right ahead. We understand that you have to protect yourselves from those rednecks."

Incindentally, that ship in the heading... She was sold to the Pakistani Navy in 1964 and was lost at sea with all hands under somewhat mysterious circumstances, which makes you wonder just how far back this thing we have with Pakistan goes.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...
While Robert Gates was proudly announcing the billions we are going to save by discontinuing development of the Missile Defense Syatem, President Obama was in Europe assuring that we will continue with its deployment. I suspect that sort of made Russia wish that Robert Gates was President rather than Obama, and probably confused the crap out of everybody else. Maybe we're going to deploy an undeveloped system?