Shakira -- no, not that one -- has arrived in the United States. A doctor in Texas is going to try to repair her face.
She has eyelashes but no eyebrows. She has all her fingers but is missing four nails. Her skin is so taut now that she can no longer frown.
But she can still smile.
Her face tells a story of suffering. Her name, Shakira, tells a story of a new journey.
in 2009 a medical mission in Pakistan's Swat Valley found three young children in a trashcan. An American drone strike had nearly killed them. Their parents had fled or died. Two of the children soon died, but a one-year old girl survived, and a member of the mission, Hashmat Effendi, named her Shakira. The girl lived for three years in a charity ward in a Lahore hospital until last week. That's when Effendi brought her back to Houston, where she lives.
Watch this video. Please.
A doctor will do his best to help her. (Kudos for the doctor, Robert McCauley of Shriner's, who's performing the surgery for free.)
He will never be able to give her eyebrows or restore the missing nails on four of her fingers. Sometimes, when Shakira eats spicy food, her flesh feels raw and irritated. She will have to always be careful about that.
He will never be able to fix the severe discoloration on her forehead. But he hopes to reconstruct her nose, fix her eyes.
The last time I wrote about the blood spilled overseas by American violence, a few people argued that this kind of thing is inherent to war, and that to highlight it is manipulative. But it's important to look at the human cost of American wars, which doesn't receive a lot of attention in the corporate media. How can we gauge a war's morality if we don't assess the cost?
There are many Shakiras, children killed or maimed or orphaned by American violence.
I would argue that the "War of Terror" isn't worth killing thousands of innocent of people and their children -- indeed that the thousands of innocent people killed renders the War on Terror not merely unjust but barbarous. A primary cause of "collateral damage" (otherwise known as innocent dead people) are missiles shot from drones, which according to one respected outfit have killed as many as 775 civilians and 168 children since 2004, and that's just in Pakistan.
Defenders of drones argue that they are killing many more militants than innocents, but there's an increasing body of evidence showing that this is far from the truth.
Noor Behram says his painstaking work has uncovered an important – and unreported – truth about the US drone campaign in Pakistan's tribal region: that far more civilians are being injured or dying than the Americans and Pakistanis admit. The world's media quickly reports on how many militants were killed in each strike. But reporters don't go to the spot, relying on unnamed Pakistani intelligence officials. Noor Behram believes you have to go to the spot to figure out whether those killed were really extremists or ordinary people living in Waziristan. And he's in no doubt.
"For every 10 to 15 people killed, maybe they get one militant," he said. "I don't go to count how many Taliban are killed. I go to count how many children, women, innocent people, are killed."
You could argue that despite Sharkira's horrific injuries, she's lucky. Generous people are helping her, and if she hadn't been found, she would have ended up dead, killed, and instead of being the focus of a feature on CNN, she would've been a statistic, or perhaps not even that.