The New York Times says at least 145 are dead, including more than 100 children. All nine attackers are also dead, according to the NYT.
This is…interesting:
Afghan Taliban condemns Pakistani Taliban's attack on school: ''Killing innocent children is against the principals of Afghan Taliban."
— ABC News (@ABC) December 16, 2014
It’s principles, Afghan Taliban (or ABC translator), principles. One is a tenet — a core value — and the other is someone you shoot for educating girls.
Other than grammar nitpicks, I got nothing.
SiubhanDuinne
And less than a week since Malala gave her Nobel Peace Prize acceptance lecture.
Suffern ACE
Obligatory “Too Soon!”
kindness
You know what I don’t understand? How a ‘spokesperson’ for the group that carried out the attack on the school isn’t immediately dragged out and lynched? It isn’t as if there aren’t enough ways to kill someone in Pakistan.
Gene108
Hopefully this will get Pakistan to get their shit together. Wresting control of Jammu and Kashmir from India cannot be worth the slaughter of their own children.
srv
Neocons told me destabilizing Afghanistan would make Pakistan more secure.
I think we’ll have a decade or two of salafists trying to out do each other. ISIS uniforms appear to be largely futball jerseys. Not sure which team the Pakistani taliban root for.
Suffern ACE
@kindness: One might get the impression that mob violence is directed only at certain people in Pakistan, and as long as the Taliban attack those same groups, it’s all good.
Betty Cracker
@kindness: I don’t know doodley-squat about Pakistan, but from what I understand, the group that carried out the attack is from a tribal region far removed from the scene of the attack, and the people around him are probably all for the attack (in principle if not in execution) because they hate the army for killing THEIR kids in earlier attacks. I believe the phrase “cycle of violence” was coined for just such a situation. Sad and horrifying.
burnspbesq
@Gene108:
Wanna bet? It’s not the children of senior Pakistani politicians or military leaders being slaughtered. If it were, maybe you’d be right.
catclub
@Gene108:
Well, you and I might think so. But I am not sure what the consensus is in Pakistan. They appear to think it is worth that much and more.
Amir Khalid
@kindness:
I’m pretty sure Mr. Spokesperson didn’t call a media conference in Islamabad to read out that statement in person.
? Martin
@Gene108:
Pakistan has never had their shit together to know what that might look like.
If Putin is willing to let Obama destroy his economy over Ukraine, I have little hope that Pakistan has the will to learn the lesson.
Mike J
@Gene108:
Water is a big part of the conflict, and global warming will make conflicts more common and more intense.
brantl
You spelled it the same way both times, Betty.
Cluttered Mind
The key word in that statement is “innocent”. If you’re a girl trying to go to school, or a student trying to learn something that they don’t want you to learn, you are no longer considered an “innocent” child and thus are a fair target.
? Martin
@Cluttered Mind: Exactly. The problem is that Pakistan Taliban killed boys, not that they killed children.
Mike J
@brantl: Repetition for emphasis, not contrast. Betty is right.
Warren Terra
My recollection is that “Taliban” literally translates to “students” or “scholars”, so you can see how the optics of this particular atrocity aren’t convenient for them.
? Martin
@Mike J: Is she? I’m pretty sure Afghan Taliban principals are actually against killing innocent children. Probably teachers and doctors and nurses too. It’s the rest of Afghan Taliban that seem to be okay with it.
srv
We Choose War
12 Dimensional Chess
Gene108
@Mike J:
Water is a secondary consideration. The big water issue in South Asia involve the Ganga and Brahmaputra rivers that flow through Bangladesh and SE Asia, which are entirely dependent on Himalayan glacial melt and replenishment in winter.
mdblanche
@burnspbesq: But since it’s their underlings’ children who were slaughtered, if the leadership doesn’t change course they could develop a fragging problem.
Liberty60
If only those children were armed, maybe some of the husky 12 year olds could have rushed the shooters…
No, not really meant to provoke a laugh. More like, those words should be written a thousand times and forcibly shoved down the throat of the person who conceived them.
trollhattan
@Gene108:
They’ll have about half the self-reflection we did over Sandy Hook then proceed to do exactly what we did: bupkis.
Also, too, as I predicted yesterday the local dead tree news front-paged Sydney from the “Australia Must Now Confront Terrorism” perspective while, buried on p5 was a very short piece on the Pennsylvania spree-killer of six, casually noting the asshole wasn’t even in custody. Surprised the headline wasn’t “Pennsylvania Man Declares Freedom from ex-wife, in-laws.”
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@kindness: The BBC reporter/analyst talking about it this morning was making a strong distinction between the Pakistani Taliban and the Afghan Taliban. They’re different. It’s not surprising that one faction would condemn another in a situation like this.
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
dedc79
”Killing innocent children is against the principals of Afghan Taliban.” I’d like to hear more about who constitutes an “innocent” child, and who does not. On second thought, I’d probably rather not know.
Betty Cracker
@dedc79: Well, just in case you really DO want to know, an alleged Pakistan Taliban commander allegedly clarified that point.
NonyNony
@Gene108:
We put up with the slaughter of our children in the US just so that the NRA can sell more guns and ammo. I’m not sure why you’d think that Pakistan values their children more than we do ours.
Ben Cisco
Attacking education…Jeb’s lucky the bastards can’t qualify for the Neo-Confederate primaries.
Liberty60
@NonyNony:
Joe the Plumber said it so much more eloquently when he said “Your dead children don’t trump my right to a gun.”
Mike E
@burnspbesq: That school apparently is where military members send their children, tho, I can’t know for sure since I only heard it on the radio, and my passport has expired.
Roger Moore
@srv:
It’s worth pointing out that the bill still needs to pass in the Senate and be signed by Obama to have anything more than symbolic effect.
Woodrowfan
Bob from Portland will be along any second to tell us that the children were really neo-Nazis and that our sympathies are misplaced.
CONGRATULATIONS!
Bullshit.
srv
@Roger Moore:
dedc79
@Betty Cracker: And our government’s response will be something along the lines of “Hey, this is nothing more drone strikes can’t fix”
Elizabelle
Saddest story I’ve woken up to in many a morning. Cannot imagine the sorrow in those towns.
It’s obscene, and so different from yesterday’s cablepalooza Terrorism!! In an Australian chocolate cafe!! Scary brown person with a gun!!
It’s just horror.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@Gene108: You’re talking about a nation of people who left India, some of who walked thousands of miles to do so, because living in peace with their Hindu neighbors was a condition they were utterly unwilling to accept.
The day of them “getting their shit together” is so far off in the future that nobody alive today will even see the beginning of that process.
trollhattan
@Elizabelle:
Beslan sprung to mind immediately.
schrodinger's cat
@CONGRATULATIONS!: I do agree that Pakistan is a basket case with no hope of much improvement in the immediate future but your analysis of the formation of Pakistan is a tad too simplistic. Besides successive Indian governments have hardly covered themselves in glory in dealing with the civilian population of Jammu and Kashmir.
Cervantes
@Betty Cracker:
That’s not a grammar nitpick.
It’s a vocabulary nitpick!
CONGRATULATIONS!
@schrodinger’s cat: Yes, I know, but try explaining it with any of the subtlety or nuance that the actual events would require in less than a paragraph. Can’t be done. So I went the quick and dirty route.
Roger Moore
@schrodinger’s cat:
Or dealing with their Muslim minority in general.
Betty Cracker
@Cervantes: Correct homophone usage falls under the purview of grammar. /meta-nitpick
trollhattan
@Betty Cracker:
When the kid was attending frequent preteen sleepovers, I had a lot of geta-nitpicks.
schrodinger's cat
@Roger Moore: Congress has been merely indifferent while the BJP has been actively hostile
Tree With Water
”Killing innocent children is against the principals (sic) of Afghan Taliban.”
It’s only the evil children they kill.
greenergood
NB: the torture post-9/11 was not to get information to protect us from Al-Q; torture was implemented to extract false confessions from hapless Afghanis and Pakistanis, etc. which would provide links between Al-Q and Iraq, so Bush and Cheney would have an excuse to invade Iraq, because Saddam dissed George’s daddy (and there’s still lots of oil, of which Mosul’s has now been commandeered by ISIS, who are funded by the (Bush-befriended) Saudis. Sick, sick, sick. And nearly all of the atrocities that have happened after that, including this most recent murder splurge, hinge on that first duplicitous use of torture beginning in 2001.
Too complicated, too scarey – la, la, la fingers in ears – Black Friday and Kim Kardashian – rant over … it’s not been a good day …
Cervantes
@Betty Cracker:
No, it does not.
But much more interesting, I agree, is the split between Talibans that you highlighted. It’s not new but the more they express it in public the better.
BruinKid
Of course the libertarians are taking their usual dickish approach to this, after Obama issued a statement condemning the attack. As one of them wrote on Facebook:
See, in their little black and white world, they see absolutely no difference when we accidentally kill children versus terrorists storming a school specifically to murder children.
Cervantes
@BruinKid:
How many of your children may I accidentally kill before you begin to protest?
And does the question lose its meaning if “libertarians” ask it?
benno
@CONGRATULATIONS!: So, I see you don’t know much about Partition.