Welcome To Afghanistan - Drone Capital of the World

Two million people have been killed in 40 years of constant war. Generations have grown up knowing nothing else. Poverty is extreme. Unemployment stagnates at an unofficial 60 per cent (and this is just for men, as women are not considered part of the workforce) and 90 per cent of all available work is in the casual sector: it’s men waiting at bridges to be picked up for construction work, cart pushers renting their backbreaking labour to market traders, women taking tailoring and embroidery into their homes, children selling incense blessings and chewing gum on the streets. Wages range from $1to $5 a day. Half a million remain refugees in their own country, defined as internally displaced. Those in Kabul live in old abandoned lots, on wasteland, opposite gleaming new hotels or an old amusement park. The camps are a full-on dystopia of plastic, sack cloth and mud shelters with open sewers. Children’s faces are tired and heat-scorched from wood fires. Intermittent aid drops have families scrambling for what they can under the machine-gun gaze of cops who steal their share with impunity. Above it all drift US surveillance blimps, data-mining this ‘adversary city’ for ‘advanced target acquisition’; scanning, ready to activate a ‘compressed kill chain’, as the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency defines it. A push of a button in a bunker can execute a person, or several, in seconds. LINK