Three people, including two children, were killed when a bomb planted in a donkey cart exploded at a Sufi shrine in Peshawar, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, on June 21. Worshippers had gathered for a weekly event at the at the Panj Peer shrine, which houses the graves of several Sufi saints, as well as popular Pashto poet Rahman Baba. The donkey, whose front legs were tied with a rope, was blown to pieces. Almost simultaneously, another bomb exploded at a mosque in Quetta, Baluchistan, killing two worshippers and wounding 13 others. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the blasts, but militants such as the Taliban vehemently oppose Sufism, a form of "folk Islam" that they consider heretical. (Pakistan Express Tribune, June 22; AFP, June 21)

Responding to outcry over civilian casualties, the Pentagon is preparing to deploy a new generation of drones the size of model planes, with miniscule warheads that can allegedly be delivered with pinpoint accuracy. The Predator and Reaper drones now in use typically carry 100-pound laser-guided Hellfire missiles or 500-pound GPS-guided "smart bombs" that can reduce buildings to smoldering rubble. The new Switchblade drone weighs less than six pounds and are supposedly designed to kill a sniper on a rooftop without destroying the building. (LAT, June 11) The announcement comes days after UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay on a visit to Pakistan said: "Drone attacks do raise serious questions about compliance with international law. The principle of distinction and proportionality and ensuring accountability for any failure to comply with international law is also difficult when drone attacks are conducted outside the military chain of command and beyond effective and transparent mechanisms of civilian or military control... I see the indiscriminate killings and injuries of civilians in any circumstances as human rights violations." (AFP, June 7)

A Pakistani doctor who helped the US government find Osama bin Laden was convicted last week for his association to a militant group in Pakistan, not for his ties to the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), as was originally reported. A court document released to the press indicates that Dr. Shakeel Afridi was sentenced to 33 years in prison because of his association with a banned militant group (Lashkar-e-Islam, according to Reuters). The document noted that the court did not have jurisdiction to address Afridi's association with the CIA. Afridi was part of a CIA attempt to gather DNA samples from residents of bin Laden's Abbattobad compound in an effort to determine whether bin Laden was present there. Pakistani court officials originally reported that Shakil was imprisoned because of his work with the CIA. It is unclear why these false reports were made.

Pakistani Dr. Shakeel Afridi was sentenced to 33 years in prison on treason charges May 23 for helping the US CIA locate Osama bin Laden, immediately sparking stateside outrage. US Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Carl Levin (D-MI) issued a joint letter, warning: "We call upon the Pakistani government to pardon and release Dr. Afridi immediately. At a time when the United States and Pakistan need more than ever to work constructively together, Dr. Afridi's continuing imprisonment and treatment as a criminal will only do further harm to US-Pakistani relations, including diminishing Congress's willingness to provide financial assistance to Pakistan." But there are a few complicating factors here...

The typical equivocation from NATO at the Chicago summit—acting as if there were a firm 2014 deadline for a withdrawal despite Obama's deal for an extended US (at least) military presence in the country. NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen went through the motions of calling the Taliban "terrorists" virtually in the same breath that he invoked negotiations with them. "I don't know whether the Taliban leadership is prepared to negotiate a solution, maybe not, I don't know, but I think we should give it a try, providing certain conditions," Rasmussen told reporters, without specifying those "conditions." So much for not negotiating with terrorists, but Western leaders have displayed such doublethink before. (Chicago Sun-Times, May 20)

The joke used to be that it was a holiday created by the greeting card industry, but does anyone send greeting cards anymore in this digital age—even on Mother's Day? You'd never know that the holiday actually has subversive anti-war roots if it weren't for periodic efforts by pacifists to rescue this inconvenient historical fact from oblivion. The latest such effort is an editorial on the lefty website Nation of Change, entitled "The Radical Roots of Mother's Day." We give them creds for serving the cause of historical memory—but, alas, we have the odious duty of calling them out on their own insidious revisionism, which sheds light on the weakness of a pure pacifist position. Here's the critical chunk of the text:

Members of Pakistan's Shi'ite Hazara ethnic minority held protests in London and Hamburg over the past days, charging "genocide" against their people with the complicity of the Islamabad regime—and the silence of the international community. Under the slogan "Stop Hazara Genocide," leaders said that a network financed from Saudi Arabia and operating with the protection of Pakistan's ISI intelligence agency has terrorized Hazaras with killings and suicide bombings on a near-daily basis for the past 10 years, especially naming the groups Sipah-e-Sahaba and Lashkar-e-Jangvi—which has publicly threatened to turn Quetta (capital of Baluchistan province, where most of the country's 600,000 Hazaras live) into a graveyard of Shi'ites. “There is a heavy presence of the law-enforcement agencies in Quetta city but it is matter of great concern that Hazaras get killed on daily basis," said Ali Raza Mogul of London's Hazara Progressive Alliance. "The government has failed to catch terrorists." (AFP, The News, Pakistan, May 1)

In his surprise visit to Afghanistan May 1, President Barack Obama signed an agreement with President Hamid Karzai to maintain a major US military presence in the country through the end of 2014—and to allow an indefinite, significant but unspecified presence beyond that date. Obama stressed that no permanent US bases will be involved, but the agreement requires Afghanistan to let US forces use Afghan bases. According to the the White House press release on the new US-Afghanistan Strategic Partnership Agreement (SPA):