The Greeks had it right. When you live on Mount Olympus, your view of humanity is qualitatively different. The Greek gods, after all, lied to, stole from, lusted for, and punished humanity without mercy while taking the planet for a spin. And it didn’t bother them a bit. They felt—so Greek mythology tells us—remarkably free to intervene from the heights in the affairs of whichever mortals caught their attention and, in the process, to do whatever took their fancy without thinking much about the nature of human lives. If they sometimes felt sympathy for the mortals whose lives they repeatedly threw into havoc, they were incapable of real empathy. Such is the nature of the world when your view is the Olympian one and what you see from the heights are so many barely distinguishable mammals scurrying about.
In early April 2010, a modern example of what it means to act from the heights was available for all to see when the website WikiLeaks released a decrypted July 2007 video of two U.S. Apache helicopters attacking Iraqis on a street in Baghdad. At least twelve Iraqis, including two employees of the Reuters news agency, a photographer and his driver, were killed in the incident, and two children in the vehicle of a good Samaritan who stopped to pick up casualties and died in the process were also wounded.
Without a doubt, that video is a remarkable seventeen-minute demonstration of how to efficiently slaughter tiny beings from on high. There is no way American helicopter crews could know just who was walking down there—Sunni or Shiite, insurgent or shopper, Baghdadis with intent to harm Americans or Baghdadis paying little attention to two of the helicopters then so regularly buzzing the city. Were they killers, guards, bank clerks, unemployed idlers, Baathist Party members, religious fanatics, café owners? Who could tell from such a height? But the details mattered little.
The Reuters cameraman crouches behind a building looking, camera first, around a corner, and you hear an American in an Apache yell, “He’s got an RPG!”—mistaking his camera with its long-range lens for a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. The pilot, of course, doesn’t know that it’s a Reuters photographer down there. Only we do. (And when his death did become known, the military carefully buried the video.) Along with that video comes a soundtrack in which you hear the Americans check out the rules of engagement, request permission to fire, and banter about the results. (“Hahaha. I hit ’em”; “Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards…”; and of the two wounded children, “Well, it’s their fault bringing their kids into a battle.”) Such callous chitchat is explained away in media articles here by the need of those whose job it is to kill for “psychological distance,” but in truth that’s undoubtedly the way you talk when you, and only you, have godlike access to the skies and can hover over the rest of humanity making preparations to wipe out lesser beings.
Another example of our Olympian detachment came in predawn darkness on February 12, 2010, in Paktia Province, eastern Afghanistan, when a U.S. Special Operations team dropped from the skies into a village near Gardez. There, in a world that couldn’t be more distant from their lives, possibly based on an informant’s bad tip, American snipers on rooftops killed an Afghan police officer (“head of intelligence in one of Paktia’s most volatile districts”), his brother, and three women—a pregnant mother of ten, a pregnant mother of six, and a teenager. They then evidently dug the bullets out of the women’s bodies, bound and gagged them, and filed a report claiming that the dead men were Taliban militants who had murdered the women—“honor killings”—before they arrived.
That was how the American press, generally reliant on military handouts, initially reported the story. Fortunately, in the face of some good on-the-spot journalism by an unembedded British reporter, this cover-up story ingloriously disintegrated, while U.S. military spokespeople retreated step by step in a series of partial admissions of error, leading to an in-person apology, including the sacrifice of a sheep and $30,000 in compensation payments.
Both incidents elicited shock and anger from critics of American war policies. And both incidents are shocking. Probably the most shocking aspect of them, however, is just how humdrum they actually were. Start with one detail in those Afghan murders, reported in most accounts but little emphasized: what the Americans descended on was a traditional family ceremony. More than twenty-five guests had gathered for the naming of a newborn child.
In fact, over the past decade, Afghan and Iraqi ceremonies of all sorts have regularly been blasted away. Keeping a partial tally of wedding parties eradicated by American air power at TomDispatch.com, I had counted five such “incidents” between December 2001 and July 2008. A sixth in July 2002 in which possibly forty Afghan wedding celebrants died and many more were wounded has since come to my attention, as has a seventh that took place in August 2008. Other kinds of rites where significant numbers of Afghans gather have not been immune from attack, including funerals, and now, naming ceremonies. And keep in mind that these are only the reported incidents in a rural land where much undoubtedly goes unreported.
Even General Stanley McChrystal, former commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, expressed surprise at a tally of at least thirty Afghans killed and eighty wounded at checkpoints when U.S. soldiers opened fire on cars. He said: “We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat.”
Take thirty-six-year-old Mohammed Yonus, a popular imam of a mosque on the outskirts of Kabul, who was killed in his car by fire from a passing NATO convoy, which considered his vehicle “threatening.” His seven-year-old son was in the back seat. Or while on the subject of Reuters employees, recall reporter Mazen Tomeizi, a Palestinian producer for the al-Arabiya satellite network of Dubai, who was killed on Haifa Street in central Baghdad in September 2004 in a U.S. helicopter attack. He was on camera at the time and his blood spattered the lens. Seif Fouad, a Reuters cameraman, was wounded in the same incident, while a number of bystanders, including a girl, were killed.
Or remember the seventeen Iraqi civilians infamously murdered when Blackwater employees in a convoy began firing in Nissour Square in Baghdad on September 16, 2007. Or the missiles regularly shot from U.S. helicopters and unmanned aerial drones into the heavily populated Shiite slum of Sadr City back in 2007 and 2008. Or the Iraqis regularly killed at checkpoints in the years since the invasion of 2003. Or, for that matter, the first moments of that invasion on March 20, 2003, when, according to Human Rights Watch, “dozens” of ordinary Iraqi civilians were killed in the fifty aerial “decapitation strikes” the Bush administration launched against Saddam Hussein and the rest of the Iraqi leadership, missing every one of them.
This is the indiscriminate nature of killing, no matter how “precise” and “surgical” the weaponry, when war is made by those who command the heavens and descend, as if from Mars, into alien worlds, convinced that they have the power to sort out the good from the bad, even if they can’t tell villagers from insurgents. Under these circumstances, death comes in a multitude of disguises—from a great distance via cruise missiles or Predator drones to close up at checkpoints where armored American troops, fingers on triggers, have no way of telling a suicide bomber from a confused or panicked local with a couple of kids in the backseat.
It comes repetitively when U.S. Special Operations forces helicopter into villages after dark looking for terror suspects based on tips from unreliable informants who may be settling local scores of which the soldiers are dismally ignorant. It comes repeatedly to Afghan police or army troops mistaken for the enemy.
It came not just to a police officer and his brother and family in Paktia Province, but to a “wealthy businessman with construction and security contracts with the nearby American base at Shindand airport” who, along with up to seventy-six members of his extended family, was slaughtered in such a raid on the village of Azizabad in Herat Province in August 2008. It came to the family of Awal Khan, an Afghan army artillery commander (away in another province) whose “schoolteacher wife, a seventeen-year-old daughter named Nadia, a fifteen-year-old son, Aimal, and his brother, employed by a government department” were killed in April 2009 in a U.S.-led raid in Khost Province in eastern Afghanistan. (Another daughter was wounded and the pregnant wife of Khan’s cousin was shot five times in the abdomen.)
It came to twelve Afghans by a roadside near the city of Jalalabad in April 2007 when marine special operations forces, attacked by a suicide bomber, let loose along a ten-mile stretch of road. Victims included a four-year-old girl, a one-year-old boy, and three elderly villagers. According to a report by Carlotta Gall of the New York Times, a “16-year-old newly married girl was cut down while she was carrying a bundle of grass to her family’s farmhouse…. A 75-year-old man walking to his shop was hit by so many bullets that his son did not recognize the body when he came to the scene.”
It came in November 2009 to two relatives of Majidullah Qarar, the spokesman for the minister of agriculture, who were shot down in cold blood in Ghazni City in another special operations night raid. It came in Uruzgan Province in February 2010 when U.S. Special Forces troops in helicopters struck a convoy of minibuses, killing up to twenty-seven civilians, including women and children. And it came on April 5, 2010, in an airstrike in Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan in which a residence was hit and four civilians—two women, an elderly man, and a child—were killed along with four men, immediately identified in a NATO press release as “suspected insurgents.” And it came one week later on the outskirts of Kandahar, when U.S. troops opened fire on a bus, killing five civilians (including a woman), wounding more, and sparking angry protests.
Whether in the skies or patrolling on the ground, Americans know next to nothing of the worlds they are passing above or through. This is, of course, even more true of the “pilots” who fly our latest wonder weapons, the Predators, Reapers, and other unmanned drones over American battle zones, while sitting at consoles somewhere in the United States. They are clearly engaged in the most literal of video-game wars, while living the most prosaic of godlike lives. A sign at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada warns such a drone pilot to “drive carefully” on leaving the base after a work shift “in” Afghanistan or Iraq. This, it says, is “the most dangerous part of your day.”
One instructor of drone pilots has described this form of warfare vividly: “Flying a Predator is like a chess game…. Because you have a God’s-eye perspective, you need to think a few moves ahead.” However much you may “think ahead,” though, the tiny, barely distinguishable creatures you’re deciding whether or not to eradicate certainly don’t inhabit the same universe as you, with your own looming needs, troubles, and concerns.
Here’s the fact of the matter: in the cities, towns, and villages of the distant lands where Americans tend to make war, civilians die regularly and repeatedly at our hands. Each death may contain its own uniquely nightmarish details, but the overall story remains remarkably repetitious. Such “incidents” are completely predictable. Even General McChrystal, determined to “protect the population” in Afghanistan as part of his counterinsurgency war, has proven remarkably incapable of changing the nature of our style of warfare. Curtail air strikes, rein in special operations night attacks—none of it will, in the long run, matter. Put in a nutshell: If you arrive from the heavens, they will die.
Having watched the death of his son, the twenty-two-year-old Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen, in that July 2007 video, his father said: “At last the truth has been revealed, and I’m satisfied God revealed the truth…. If such an incident took place in America, even if an animal were killed like this, what would they do?” Noor-Eldeen may not have gone far enough. For that helicopter crew, his son was indeed the wartime equivalent of a hunted animal. An article on the front page of the New York Times captured this perspective, however inadvertently, when, speaking of the CIA’s aerial war over Pakistan’s tribal borderlands, it described the agency’s unmanned drones as “observing and tracking targets, then unleashing missiles on their quarry.” The word quarry has quite a straightforward definition: “a hunted animal; prey.” Indeed, the al-Qaeda leaders, Taliban militants, and local civilians in the region are all “prey” which, of course, makes us the predators. That the majority of drones cruising those skies 24-7 and repeatedly launching their Hellfire missiles are named “Predators” should come as no surprise.
Americans are unused to being the prey in war and so essentially incapable of imagining what that actually means, day in, day out, year after year. We prefer to think of their deaths as so many accidents or mistakes—“collateral damage”—when they are the norm, not what’s collateral in such wars. We prefer to imagine ourselves bringing the best of values and intentions to a backward, ignorant world and so invariably make ourselves sound far kindlier than we are. Like the gods of Olympus, we have a tendency to flatter ourselves, even as we continually remake the “rules of engagement” to suit our changing tastes and needs, while creating a language of war that suits our tender sensibilities about ourselves.
In this way, for instance, assassination-by-drone has become an ever more central part of the Obama administration’s foreign and war policy, and yet the word assassination—with all its negative implications, legal and otherwise—has been displaced by the far more anodyne, bureaucratic term targeted killing. In a sense, in fact, what “enhanced interrogation techniques” were to the Bush administration, “targeted killing” is to the Obama administration.
For the gods, anything is possible. In the language of Olympian war, for instance, even sitting at a console thousands of miles from the not-quite-humans you are preparing to obliterate can become an act worthy of Homeric praise. As Greg Jaffe of the Washington Post reported, Colonel Eric Mathewson, the air force officer with the most experience with unmanned aircraft, has a new notion of “valor,” a word “which is a part of almost every combat award citation.” “Valor to me is not risking your life,” he says. “Valor is doing what is right. Valor is about your motivations and the ends that you seek. It is doing what is right for the right reasons.”
What the gods do is, by definition, glorious.
It’s not only the American way of war, but the American way of statecraft that arrives as if from the heavens, ready to impose its own definitions of the good and necessary on the world. American officials, civilian and military, constantly fly into the embattled (and let’s be blunt: Muslim) regions of the planet to make demands, order, chide, plead, wheedle, cajole, intimidate, threaten, twist arms, and bluster to get our “allies” to do what we most want.
Our special plenipotentiaries, our envoys, our secretary of state, our chairman of the Joint Chiefs, our Centcom commander, and our secretary of defense descend from the clouds on Islamabad, Kabul, or Baghdad frequently. Our vice president careens Iraq-wards to help mediate disputes, and even our president, the “heaviest political artillery” (as one analyst called him), dropped in for a six-hour visit to “Afghanistan” (actually the hanger of a large American air base and the presidential palace in Kabul) in 2010. While there—as American papers reported quite proudly—he chided and “pressed” Afghan president Hamid Karzai, offered “pointed criticism” on corruption, and delivered “a tough message.” He then returned to the United States to find, to the surprise and frustration of his top officials, that Karzai—almost immediately accused of being unstable, possibly on drugs, and prone to childlike tantrums—responded by lashing out at his American minders.
We are, of course, the rational ones, the grown-ups, the good governance team, the incorruptible crew who bring enlightenment and democracy to the world, even if, as practical gods, in support of our Afghan War we’re perfectly willing to shore up a corrupt autocrat elsewhere who is willing to lend us an air base (for $60 million a year in rent) to haul in troops and supplies—until he falls.
All of this is par for the course for the Olympians from North America. It all seems normal, even benign, except in the rare moments when videos of slaughter begin to circulate. Viewed from the ground up, however, we undoubtedly seem as petulant as the gods or demiurges of some malign religion, or as the aliens and predators of some horrific sci-fi film—heartless, unfeeling, and murderous. As Safa Chmagh, the brother of one of the Reuters employees who died in the 2007 Apache attack, reportedly said: “The pilot is not human, he’s a monster. What did my brother do? What did his children do? Does the pilot accept his kids to be orphans?”
As with tales humans tell of the gods, there’s a moral here: If you want it to be otherwise, don’t descend on strange lands armed to the teeth, prepared to occupy, and ready to kill.
Before George W. Bush had his fever dream, the United States had already put its first unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drone surveillance planes in the skies over Kosovo in the late 1990s. By November 2001, it had armed them with missiles and was flying them over Afghanistan. In November 2002, a Predator drone would loose a Hellfire missile on a car in Yemen, a country with which we weren’t at war. Six suspected al-Qaeda members, including a suspect in the bombing of the USS Cole, would be turned into twisted metal and ash—the first “targeted killings” of the American robotic era.
Just two months earlier, in September 2002, as the Bush administration was “introducing” its campaign to sell an invasion of Iraq to Congress and the American people, CIA director George Tenet and Vice President Dick Cheney “trooped up to Capitol Hill” to brief four top Senate and House leaders on a hair-raising threat to the country. A “smoking gun” had been uncovered. According to “new intelligence,” Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had in his possession unmanned aerial vehicles advanced enough to be armed with biological and chemical weaponry. Worse yet, these were capable—so the CIA director and vice president claimed—of spraying those weapons of mass destruction over cities on the East Coast of the United States.
It was just the sort of evil plan you might have expected from a man regularly compared to Adolf Hitler in our media, and the news evidently made an impression in Congress. Democratic senator Bill Nelson of Florida, for example, said that he voted for the administration’s resolution authorizing force in Iraq because “I was told not only that [Saddam had weapons of mass destruction] and that he had the means to deliver them through unmanned aerial vehicles, but that he had the capability of transporting those UAVs outside of Iraq and threatening the homeland here in America, specifically by putting them on ships off the eastern seaboard.”
In a speech in October 2002, President Bush offered a version of this apocalyptic nightmare to the American public. Of course, like Saddam’s supposed ability to produce “mushroom clouds” over American cities, the Iraqi autocrat’s advanced UAVs (along with the ships needed to position them off the U.S. coast) were a feverish fantasy of the Bush era and would soon enough be forgotten.
Instead, in the years to come, it would be American pilotless drones that would repeatedly attack Iraqi urban areas with Hellfire missiles and bombs. In those years, our drones would also strike repeatedly in Afghanistan, and especially in the tribal borderlands of Pakistan, where in an escalating “secret” or “covert” war, which has been no secret to anyone, multiple drone attacks often occur weekly. They are now considered so much the norm that, with humdrum headlines slapped on (“U.S. missile strike kills 12 in NW Pakistan”), they barely make it out of summary articles about war developments in the American press.
And yet those robotic planes, with their young “pilots” (as well as the camera operators and intelligence analysts who make up a drone “crew”) sitting in front of consoles 7,000 miles away from where their missiles and bombs are landing, have become another kind of American fever dream. The drone is our latest wonder weapon and a bragging point in a set of wars where there has been little enough to brag about. CIA director Leon Panetta has, for instance, called the agency’s drones flying over Pakistan “the only game in town” when it comes to destroying al-Qaeda.
A typically anonymous U.S. official in a Washington Post report claimed of drone missile attacks, “We’re talking about precision unsurpassed in the history of warfare.” Or as Gordon Johnson of the Pentagon’s Joint Forces Command told author Peter Singer, speaking of the glories of drones: “They don’t get hungry. They are not afraid. They don’t forget their orders. They don’t care if the guy next to them has been shot. Will they do a better job than humans? Yes.”
Seven thousand of them, the vast majority of the surveillance variety, are reportedly already being operated by the military, and that’s before swarms of “mini-drones” come online. Our American world is being redefined accordingly.
These days, CIA and administration officials troop up to Capitol Hill to offer briefings to Congress on the miraculous value of pilotless drones: in disrupting al-Qaeda, destroying its leadership or driving it “deeper into hiding,” and taking out key figures in the Taliban. Indeed, what started as a 24-7 assassination campaign against al-Qaeda’s top leadership has already widened considerably. The “target set” has by now reportedly expanded to take in ever lower-level militants in the tribal borderlands. In other words, a drone assassination campaign is morphing into the first full-scale drone war. And, as in all wars from the air, civilians are dying in unknown numbers.
If the temperature is again rising in Washington when it comes to these weapons, this time it’s a fever of enthusiasm for the spectacular future of drones. The air force has in fact, plotted out that future to the year 2047, to a time when single pilots should be able to handle multiple drones in operations in the skies over some embattled land, and both to a far more distant moment when those drones should be able to handle themselves, flying, fighting, and making key decisions about just who to take out without a human being having to intervene.
When we possess such weaponry, it turns out, there’s nothing unnerving or disturbing, apocalyptic or dystopian about it. Today, in the American homeland, not a single smoking drone is in sight.
Now it’s the United States whose drones are ever more powerfully weaponized. It’s the United States that is developing a twenty-two ton, tail-less drone twenty times larger than a Predator that can fly at Mach 7 and (theoretically) land on the pitching deck of an aircraft carrier. It’s the Pentagon that is planning to increase the funding of drone development by 700 percent over the next decade.
Admittedly, there is a modest counter-narrative to all this enthusiasm for our robotic prowess and “precision.” It involves legal types like Philip Alston, the United Nations special representative on extrajudicial executions. He issued a twenty-nine-page report criticizing Washington’s “ever-expanding entitlement for itself to target individuals across the globe.” Unless limits are put on such claims, and especially on the CIA’s drone war over Pakistan, he suggests, soon enough a plethora of states will follow in America’s footprints, attacking people in other lands “labeled as terrorists by one group or another.” Such mechanized, long-distance warfare, he also suggests, will breach what respect remains for the laws of war.
“Because operators are based thousands of miles away from the battlefield,” he wrote, “and undertake operations entirely through computer screens and remote audio-feed, there is a risk of developing a ‘PlayStation’ mentality to killing.” Similarly, the ACLU has filed a freedom of information act lawsuit against the U.S. government, demanding that it “disclose the legal basis for its use of unmanned drones to conduct targeted killings overseas, as well as the ground rules regarding when, where, and against whom drone strikes can be authorized, and the number of civilian casualties they have caused.”
But pay no mind to all this. The arguments may be legally compelling, but not in Washington, which has mounted a half-hearted claim to legitimate “self-defense,” but senses that it’s already well past the point where legalities matter. The die is cast, the money committed. The momentum for drone war and yet more drone war is overwhelming. It’s a done deal. Drone war is, and will be, us.
If there are zeitgeist moments for products, movie stars, and even politicians, then such moments can exist for weaponry as well. The robotic drone is the Lady Gaga of this Pentagon moment.
It’s a moment that could, of course, be presented as an apocalyptic nightmare in the style of the Terminator movies (with the United States as the soul-crushing Skynet) or as a remarkable tale of how “networking technology is expanding a home front that is increasingly relevant to day-to-day warfare” (as Christopher Drew put it in the New York Times). It could be described as the arrival of a dystopian fantasy world of one-way slaughter verging on entertainment or as the coming of a generation of homegrown video warriors who work “in camouflage uniforms, complete with combat boots, on open floors, with four computer monitors on each desk… and coffee and Red Bull help[ing] them get through the 12-hour shifts.” It could be presented as the ultimate in cowardice—the killing of people in a world you know nothing about from thousands of miles away—or a new form of “valor.”
The drones—their use expanding exponentially, with ever newer generations on the drawing boards, and the planes even heading for “the homeland”—could certainly be considered a demon spawn of modern warfare, or (as is generally the case in the United States) a remarkable example of American technological ingenuity, a problem solver of the first order at a time when few American problems seem capable of solution. Thanks to our technological prowess, it’s claimed that we can now kill them, wherever they may be lurking, at absolutely no cost to ourselves, other than the odd malfunctioning drone. Not that even all CIA operatives involved in the drone wars agree with that one. Some of them understand perfectly well that there’s a price to be paid.
As it happens, the enthusiasm for drones is as much a fever dream as the one President Bush and his associates offered back in 2002, but it’s also distinctly us. Drone warfare fits us like a glove. With its consoles, chat rooms, and “single shooter” death machines, it certainly fits the skills of a generation raised on the computer, Facebook, and video games. That our valorous warriors, their day of battle done, can increasingly leave war behind and head home to the barbecue (or, given American life, the foreclosure) also fits an American mood.
If the drone presents the most extreme version thus far of the detachment of human beings from the battlefield (on only one side, of course) and so launches a basic redefinition of what war is all about, it also catches something important about the American way of war. After all, while this country garrisons the world, invests its wealth in its military, and fights unending, unwinnable frontier wars and skirmishes, most Americans are remarkably detached from all this. If anything, since the Vietnam War era, when an increasingly rebellious citizens’ army proved disastrous for Washington’s global aims, such detachment has been the goal of American war-making.
As a start, with no draft and so no citizens’ army, war and the toll it takes is now the professional business of a tiny percentage of Americans (and their families). It occurs thousands of miles away and, in the Bush years, also became a heavily privatized, for-profit activity. As Pratap Chatterjee notes, “[E]very U.S. soldier deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq is matched by at least one civilian working for a private company. All told, about 239,451 contractors work for the Pentagon in battle zones around the world.” And a majority of those contractors aren’t even U.S. citizens.
If drones have entered our world as media celebrities, they have done so largely without debate. In a sense, our wars abroad could be thought of as the equivalent of so many drones. We send our troops off and then go home for dinner and put them out of mind.
Maybe what we need is the return of George W. Bush’s fever dream from the American oblivion in which it’s now interred. He was beyond wrong, of course, when it came to Saddam Hussein and Iraqi drones, but he wasn’t completely wrong about the dystopian Drone World to come. There are now reportedly more than fifty countries that have purchased or are developing versions of those pilotless planes. In early 2010, the Iranians announced that they were starting up production lines for both armed and unarmed drones. Hezbollah used them against Israel in the 2006 summer war, years after Israel began pioneering their use in targeted killings of Palestinians.
Right now, in what still remains largely a post–Cold War arms race of one, the United States is racing to produce ever more advanced drones to fight our wars, with few competitors in sight. We’re also obliterating classic ideas of national sovereignty, and of who can be killed by whom under what circumstances. We may not just be obliterating enemies, but creating them wherever our drones buzz overhead and our missiles strike. We are also creating the (il)legal framework for future war on a frontier where we won’t long be flying solo. And when the first Iranian, or Russian, or Chinese missile-armed drones start knocking off their chosen sets of “terrorists,” we won’t like it one bit. When the first “suicide drones” appear, we’ll like it even less. And if drones with the ability to spray chemical or biological weapons finally do make the scene, we’ll be truly unnerved.
In the 1990s, we were said to be in an era of “globalization,” which was widely hailed as good news. Now, the United States and its detached populace are pioneering a new era of killing that respects no boundaries, relies on the self-definitions of whoever owns the nearest drone, and establishes planetary free-fire zones. It’s a nasty business, this globalization of death.
Consider the following statement offered by Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at a news conference on Thursday, June 24, 2010. He was discussing Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks as well as the person who had taken responsibility for the vast Afghan War document release at that site. “Mr. Assange,” Mullen commented, “can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his source are doing, but the truth is they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family.”
Now, if you were the proverbial fair-minded visitor from Mars (who, in school civics texts of my childhood, always seemed to land on Main Street, U.S.A., to survey the wonders of our American system), you might be a bit taken aback by Mullen’s statement. After all, a crucial revelation in the trove of leaked documents Assange put online had to do with how much blood from innocent Afghan civilians was already on American hands.
The British Guardian was one of three publications given early access to the leaked archive, and it began its main article this way: “A huge cache of secret U.S. military files today provides a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents. They range from the shootings of individual innocents to the often massive loss of life from air strikes.” Or as the paper added in a piece headlined “Secret CIA Paramilitaries’ Role in Civilian Deaths”: “Behind the military jargon, the war logs are littered with accounts of civilian tragedies. The 144 entries in the logs, recording some of these so-called ‘blue on white’ events, cover a wide spectrum of day-by-day assaults on Afghans, with hundreds of casualties.” Or as it also reported, when exploring documents related to Task Force 373, an “undisclosed ‘black’ unit” of U.S. Special Operations forces focused on assassinating Taliban and al-Qaeda “senior officials”: “The logs reveal that TF 373 has also killed civilian men, women, and children and even Afghan police officers who have strayed into its path.”
Admittedly, the events recorded in the WikiLeaks archive took place between 2004 and the end of 2009, and so don’t cover the Obama administration’s across-the-board surge in Afghanistan. Then again, Admiral Mullen became chairman of the Joint Chiefs in October 2007, and so has been at the helm of the American war machine for more than two of the years in question. He was, for example, chairman in July 2008, when an American plane or planes took out an Afghan bridal party—seventy to ninety strong and made up mostly of women—on a road near the Pakistani border. They were “escorting the bride to meet her groom as local tradition dictates.” The bride, whose name we don’t know, died too, as did at least twenty-seven other members of the party, including children. Mullen was similarly chairman in August 2008 when a memorial service for a tribal leader in the village of Azizabad in Afghanistan’s Herat Province was hit by repeated U.S. air strikes that killed at least ninety civilians, including perhaps fifteen women and up to sixty children.
Mullen was still chairman when, in November 2009, two relatives of Majidullah Qarar, the spokesman for the minister of agriculture, were shot down in cold blood in Ghazni City in a special operations night raid; as he was—and here we move beyond the WikiLeaks time frame—when, in February 2010, U.S. Special Forces troops in helicopters struck a convoy of minibuses, killing up to twenty-seven civilians, including women and children. He was no less chairman in July of 2010 when residents of a small town in Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan claimed that a NATO missile attack had killed fifty-two civilians, an incident that, like just about every other one mentioned above and so many more, was initially denied by U.S. and NATO spokespeople.
And this represents only a grim, minimalist highlight reel among rafts of such incidents, including repeated killings or woundings of innocent civilians at checkpoints. In other words, if your basic Martian visitor were to take the concept of command responsibility at all seriously, he might reasonably weigh actual blood (those hundreds of unreported civilian casualties of the American war the Guardian highlighted, for example) against prospective blood (possible Afghan informers killed by the Taliban via names combed from the WikiLeaks documents) and arrive at quite a different conclusion from Chairman Mullen.
In fact, being from another planet, he might even have picked up on something that most Americans would be unlikely to notice—that, with only slight alterations, Mullen’s blistering comment about Assange could be applied remarkably well to Mullen himself. “Chairman Mullen,” that Martian might have responded, “can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he is doing, but the truth is he already has on his hands the blood of some young soldiers and that of many Afghan families.”
Fortunately, there are remarkably few Martians in America, as was apparent when the WikiLeaks story broke in June 2010. Certainly, they were in scarce supply in the upper reaches of the Pentagon and, it seemed, hardly less scarce in the mainstream media. If, for instance, you read the version of the WikiLeaks story produced—with the same several weeks of special access—by the New York Times, you might have been forgiven for thinking that the Times reporters had accessed a different archive of documents than had the Guardian crew.
While the Guardian led with the central significance of those unreported killings of Afghan civilians, the Times led with reports (mainly via Afghan intelligence) of a Pakistani double-cross of the American war effort—of the ties, that is, between Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI, and the Taliban. The paper’s major sidebar piece concerned the experiences and travails of Outpost Keating, an isolated American base in Afghanistan. To stumble across the issue of civilian deaths at American hands in the Times coverage, you had to make your way off the front page and through two full four-column WikiLeaks-themed pages and deep into a third.
With rare exceptions, this was typical of initial American coverage of that initial document dump. The WikiLeaks story, in fact, remained a remarkably bloodless saga in the United States until Admiral Mullen and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates (who oversaw the Afghan War since being confirmed in his post in December 2006) took control of it and began focusing directly on blood, specifically, the blood on Julian Assange’s hands. Within a few days, that had become the WikiLeaks story, as headlines like CNN’s “Top Military Official: WikiLeaks Founder May Have ‘Blood’ on His Hands” indicated. On ABC News, for instance, in a typical “bloody hands” piece of reportage, the secretary of defense told interviewer Christiane Amanpour that, whatever Assange’s legal culpability might be, when it came to “moral culpability… that’s where I think the verdict is guilty on WikiLeaks.”
Moral culpability. From the Martian point of view, it might have been considered a curious phrase from the lips of the man responsible for the previous three and a half years of two deeply destructive wars that have accomplished nothing and have been responsible for killing, wounding, or driving into exile millions of ordinary Iraqis and Afghans. Given the reality of those wars, our increasingly wide-eyed visitor, now undoubtedly camping out on the Washington Mall, might have been struck by the selectivity of our sense of what constitutes blood and what constitutes collateral damage.
Here, then, is a fact that our Martian (but few Americans) might notice: in a decade of futile and brutal war in Afghanistan and more than eight years of the same in Iraq, the United States has filled metaphorical tower upon tower with the exceedingly unmetaphorical bodies of civilian innocents, via air attacks, checkpoint shootings, night raids, artillery and missile fire, and, in some cases, the direct act of murder. Afghans and Iraqis have died in numbers impossible to count (though some have tried).
Among those deaths was that of a good Samaritan who stopped his minivan on a Baghdad street in July 2007 to help transport Iraqis wounded by an American Apache helicopter attack to the hospital. In repayment, he and his two children were gunned down by that same Apache crew. (The children survived; the event was covered up; typically, no American took responsibility for it; the case was not further investigated, and no one was punished or even reprimanded.) That was one of hundreds, or thousands, of similar events in both wars that Americans have known little or nothing about.
Now, Private Bradley Manning, a twenty-two-year-old intelligence analyst deployed to eastern Baghdad, who reportedly leaked the video of the event to WikiLeaks and may have leaked those ninety-two thousand documents as well, is preparing to face a court-martial, was branded a “traitor” by a U.S. senator, his future execution endorsed by the ranking minority member of the House of Representatives’ subcommittee on terrorism, and is almost certain to find himself behind bars for years or decades to come. As for the men who oversaw the endless wars that produced that video (and, without doubt, many similar ones cloaked in the secrecy of “national security”), their fates are no less sure.
When Admiral Mullen relinquishes his post and retires, he will undoubtedly have his choice of lucrative corporate boards to sit on, and, if he cares to, lucrative consulting to do for the Pentagon or eager defense contractors, as well as an impressive pension to take home with him. Secretary of Defense Gates will undoubtedly leave his post with a wide range of job offers to consider, and if he wishes, he will probably get a multimillion-dollar contract to write his memoirs. Both will be praised, no matter what happens in or to their wars. Neither will be considered in any way responsible for those tens of thousands of dead civilians in distant lands.
Moral culpability? It doesn’t apply. Not to Americans—not unless they leak military secrets. None of the men responsible will ever look at their hands and experience an “out, damned spot!” moment. That’s a guarantee. However, a young man who, it seems, saw the blood and didn’t want it on his hands, who found himself “actively involved in something that I was completely against,” who had an urge to try to end two terrible wars, hoping his act would cause “worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms,” will pay the price for them. He will be another body not to count in the collateral damage their wars have caused. He will also be collateral damage to the Afghan antiwar movement that wasn’t.
The men who led us down this path, the presidents who presided over our wars, the military figures and secretaries of defense, the intelligence chiefs and ambassadors who helped make them happen, will have libraries to inaugurate, books to write, awards to accept, speeches to give, honors to receive, talk shows to go on. They will be treated with great respect, while Americans—once we have finally left the lands we insistently fought over—will undoubtedly feel little culpability either. And if blowback comes to the United States, and the first suicide drones arrive, everyone will be deeply puzzled and angered, but one thing is certain, we will not consider any damage done to our society “collateral” damage.
So much blood. So many hands. So little culpability. No remorse.
Remember how, as the invasion of Iraq was about to begin, the Bush administration decided to seriously enforce a Pentagon ban, in existence since the first Gulf War, on media coverage and images of the American dead arriving home at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware? In fact, the Bush-era ban did more than that. As the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank wrote, it “ended the public dissemination of such images by banning news coverage and photography of dead soldiers’ homecomings on all military bases.”
For those whose lives were formed in the crucible of the Vietnam years, including the civilian and military leadership of the Bush era, the dead, whether ours or the enemy’s, were seen as a potential minefield when it came to antiwar opposition or simply the loss of public support in the opinion polls. Admittedly, many of the so-called lessons of the Vietnam War were based on half-truths or pure mythology, but they were no less powerful or influential for that.
In the Vietnam years, the Pentagon had, for instance, been stung by the thought that images of the American dead coming home in body bags had spurred on that era’s huge antiwar movement (though, in reality, those images were rare). Nor were they likely to forget the effect of the “body count,” offered by U.S. military spokesmen in late afternoon press briefings in Saigon, the South Vietnamese capital. Among disillusioned reporters, these became known as “the Five O’clock Follies.” They were supposedly accurate counts of enemy dead, but everyone knew otherwise.
In a guerrilla war in which the taking of territory made next to no difference, the body count was meant as a promissory note against future success. As it became apparent that there would be no light at the end of the tunnel, however, that count began to look more barbaric to growing numbers of Americans.
At the time of the first Gulf War, as part of a larger effort to apply the “lessons” of Vietnam, the Pentagon attempted to prevent any images of the American dead from reaching the home front. More than a decade later, top officials of George W. Bush’s administration, focused on ensuring that the invasion of Iraq would be a “cakewalk” and a triumph, consciously played an opposites game with their version of Vietnam. That included, for instance, secretly counting the enemy dead but keeping mum about them for fear of re-creating the dreaded “body count.”
General Tommy Franks, who directed the invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq, bluntly insisted, “We don’t do body counts.” But it wasn’t true, and in the end, President Bush couldn’t help himself: his frustration with disaster in Iraq led him to start complaining about being unable to mention how successful U.S. forces were in killing the enemy. Finally, compulsively, he began to offer his own presidential body counts.
But an irony should be noted here. There was another lesson from Vietnam that didn’t quite fit with those drawn from body bags and the body count. American troops had been treated terribly by the American public—so went the postwar tale—and particularly by the antiwar movement that reviled them as “baby killers” when they came home and regularly spat upon them. Often ignored in this mythic version of the antiwar movement was the fact that, as the 1970s began, it was being energized by significant numbers of Vietnam vets and active duty GIs. Nonetheless, all this was deeply believed, even by many who had been in that movement, and everyone, whatever their politics, vowed that it would never happen again. Hence, the troops, and especially the dead, were to be treated across the board and in a blanket way as “American heroes,” and elevated to almost godlike status.
So, while President Bush carefully avoided making public appearances at Dover Air Force Base as the coffins were being unloaded (lest someone confuse him with Vietnam-era president Lyndon Johnson), much publicity was given to the way he met privately and emotionally—theoretically beyond the view of the media—with the families of the dead.
In a sense, whatever proscriptions were placed on imagery of the dead, the American dead were all over. For one thing, no sooner did the Bush administration shut down those images than war critics, following their own Vietnam “lessons,” began complaining about his doing so. And even if they hadn’t, every newspaper seemed to have its own “wall of heroes,” those spreads filled with tiny images of the faces of the American dead, while their names were repeatedly read in somber tones on television. Similarly, antiwar activists toured the country with displays of empty combat boots or set up little cemeteries honoring the war dead, even while making the point that they should never have died.
No less significantly, dying Americans were actually news. I mean front-page news. If American troops died in a firefight or because of a suicide bomber or went down in a helicopter, it was often in the headlines. Whatever else you knew, you did know that Americans were dying in the wars Washington was fighting in distant lands.
Well, that was Iraq, this is Afghanistan. That was the Bush era, these are the Obama years. And, with rare exceptions, the dead seldom make much news anymore.
Now, except in small towns and local communities where the news of a local death or the funeral of a dead soldier is dealt with as a major event, American deaths, often dribbling in one or two at a time, are generally acknowledged in the last paragraphs of summary war pieces buried deep inside papers (or far into the TV news). The American dead have, it seems, like the war they are now fighting, generally gone into the dustbin of news coverage.
Take the month of November 2010 in Afghanistan. You might have thought that American deaths would make headline news. After all, according to the website icasualties.org, there were fifty-eight allied deaths in that thirty-day period, fifty-three of them American. While those numbers were undoubtedly small if compared to, say, fatal traffic accidents, they were distinctly on the rise. Along with much other news coming out of the planet’s number one narco-state, ranging from raging corruption to a rise in Taliban attacks, they trended terribly.
In understanding how this relative lack of attention was possible, it’s worth noting that the American dead tend to come disproportionately from easy-to-ignore, tough-luck regions of the country, and disproportionately as well from small town and rural America, where service in the armed forces may be more valued, but times are also rougher, unemployment rates higher, and opportunities fewer. In this context, consider those November dead. If you look through the minimalist announcements released by the Pentagon, you discover that they were almost all men in their twenties, and that none of them seem to have come from our giant metropolises. Among the hometowns of the dead there was no Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, or Houston. There were a range of second-level cities including Flagstaff (Arizona), Rochester (New York), San Jose (California), Tallahassee (Florida), and Tucson (Arizona).
For the rest of the hometown names the Pentagon lists, from Aroostook, Maine, to Mesquite, Texas, whether they represent rural areas, small towns, parts of suburbs, or modest-sized cities, they read like a dirge for places you’ve never heard of unless you yourself were born there or lived in the vicinity. Here, for instance, are the hometowns of the six U.S. trainers who died in a single incident in late November when a “trusted” Afghan policeman opened fire on them: Athens, Ohio (pop. 21,909), Beaver Dam, Wisconsin (pop. 15,169), Mexico, Maine (pop. 2,959), Quartz Hill, California (pop. 9,890), Senoia, Georgia (pop. 3,720), Tell City, Indiana (pop. 7,845). Here, as well, are some, but hardly all, of the other hometowns of the November dead: Chesterfield, Michigan, Chittenango, New York, Conroe, Texas, Dalzell, South Carolina, Davie, Florida, Fort Smith, Arkansas, Freeman, Missouri, Frostburg, Maryland, Greenfield, Wisconsin, Greenwood, Louisiana, Mills River, North Carolina, Pago Pago, American Samoa, Sierra Vista, Arizona, Thomasville, Georgia, and Wyomissing, Pennsylvania.
Back in early 2007, demographer William O’Hare and journalist Bill Bishop, working with the University of New Hampshire’s Carsey Institute, which specializes in the overlooked rural areas of our country, crunched the numbers on the rural dead from America’s recent wars. According to their study, the death rate “for rural soldiers (twenty-four per million adults aged eighteen to fifty-nine) is 60 percent higher than the death rate for those soldiers from cities and suburbs (fifteen deaths per million).” More recently, sociologist Katherine Curtis arrived at similar conclusions in a study using data on U.S. troop deaths in Iraq through 2007. There’s no reason to believe that much has changed in the last few years.
Keep in mind that a number of the soldiers who died in November 2010 had undoubtedly been in Afghanistan before, probably more than once, and had they lived (and stayed in the military), they would surely have been there again. The reason is simple enough: the full weight of the American war state and its seemingly eternal state of war lands squarely on the relatively modest numbers of “volunteers,” often from out-of-the-way places, who make up the American fighting force. Multiple tours of duty are now the norm.
Given the modest attention focused on American deaths here in the United States, you might almost imagine that, from the Washington elite on down, Americans preferred not to know the price being paid for a war, already in its tenth year—and which the Obama administration has officially extended through 2014 for U.S. “combat troops” and possibly years beyond for tens of thousands of noncombat trainers and other forces who will be in no less danger.
In October 2009, six months after the Pentagon rescinded its ban on coverage of the arrival of the war dead, in an obvious rebuke to his predecessor, President Obama traveled to Dover Air Base. There, inside the plane that brought the dead home, he reportedly prayed over the coffins and was later photographed offering a salute as one of them was carried off the plane. (Eighteen were unloaded that day, including three containing dead agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration.) It was a moving ceremony and, as Byron York, columnist for the conservative Washington Times, pointed out not long after, the president wasn’t alone. Thirty-five media outlets were there to cover him. Like so much in the Obama era, as York also noted, this particular post-Bush version of a sunshine policy didn’t last long in practice.
Now that the dead can be covered, with rare exceptions few seem to care. For those who want to keep a significant American presence in Iraq, continue our war in Afghanistan until hell freezes over, and expand the Global War on Terror (stripped of its name in the Obama years but bolstered in reality), it’s undoubtedly more convenient if the dead, like their war, remain in those shadows. In the Bush years, the dead, despite bans, seemed to be everywhere. In the Obama years, except to the spouses and children, parents, relatives, friends, and neighbors they leave behind, they seem to have disappeared into the netherworld like the “shadows” we sometimes imagine them to be. In this, they have followed the war in which they fought to a premature graveyard of American inattention.
When men first made war in the air, the imagery that accompanied them was of knights jousting in the sky. Just check out movies like Wings, which won the first Oscar for Best Picture in 1927 (or any Peanuts cartoon in which Snoopy takes on the Red Baron in a literal “dogfight”). As late as 1986, five years after two American F-14s shot down two Soviet MiGs flown by Libyan pilots over the Mediterranean’s Gulf of Sidra, it was still possible to make the movie Top Gun. In it, Tom Cruise played “Maverick,” a U.S. naval aviator triumphantly involved in a similar incident. (He shoots down three MiGs.)
Admittedly, by then American air-power films had long been in decline. In Vietnam, the United States had used its air superiority to devastating effect, bombing the North and blasting the South, but go to American Vietnam films and, while that U.S. patrol walks endlessly into a South Vietnamese village with mayhem to come, the air is largely devoid of planes.
Consider Top Gun an anomaly. Anyway, it’s been twenty-five years since that film topped the box office—and don’t hold your breath for a repeat at your local multiplex. After all, there’s nothing left to base such a film on. To put it simply, it’s time for Americans to take the “war” out of “air war.” These days, we need a new set of terms to explain what U.S. air power actually does.
American “air superiority” in any war the United States now fights is total. In fact, the last time American jets met enemy planes of any sort in any skies was in the first Gulf War in 1991, and since Saddam Hussein’s once powerful air force didn’t offer much opposition—most of its planes fled to Iran—that was brief. The last time U.S. pilots faced anything like a serious challenge in the skies was in North Vietnam in the early 1970s. Before that, you have to go back to the Korean War in the early 1950s.
This, in fact, is something American military types take great pride in. Addressing the cadets of the Air Force Academy in March 2011, for example, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates stated: “There hasn’t been a U.S. Air Force airplane lost in air combat in nearly forty years, or an American soldier attacked by enemy aircraft since Korea.” And he’s probably right, though it’s also possible that the last American plane shot down in aerial combat was U.S. Navy pilot Michael Scott Speicher’s jet in the first Gulf War. (The navy continues to claim that the plane was felled by a surface-to-air missile.)
As an F-117A Stealth fighter was downed by a surface-to-air missile over Serbia in 1999, it’s been more than eleven years since such a plane was lost due to anything but mechanical malfunction. Yet in those years, the U.S. military has remained almost continuously at war somewhere and has used air power extensively, as in its “shock and awe” launching of the invasion of Iraq, which was meant to “decapitate” Saddam Hussein and the rest of the Iraqi leadership. No plane was lost, nor was an Iraqi leader of any sort taken out in those fifty decapitation attacks, though dozens of Iraqi civilians died.
You might even say that air power, now ramping up again in Afghanistan, has continued to be the American way of war. From a military point of view, this is something worth bragging about. It’s just that the obvious conclusions are never drawn from it.
To be a “top gun” in the U.S. military today is to be in staggeringly less danger than any American who gets into a car and heads just about anywhere, given this country’s annual toll of about 34,000 fatal car crashes. In addition, there is far less difference than you might imagine between piloting a drone aircraft from a base thousands of miles away and being inside the cockpit of a fighter jet.
Articles are now regularly written about drone aircraft “piloted” by teams sitting at consoles in places like Creech Air Force Base in Nevada. Meanwhile, their planes are loosing Hellfire missiles thousands of miles away in Afghanistan (or, in the case of CIA “pilots,” in the Pakistani tribal borderlands). When it comes to pilots in planes flying over Afghanistan, we imagine something quite different—and yet we shouldn’t. Based on the record, those pilots might as well be in Nevada, since there is no enemy that can touch them. They are inviolate unless their own machines betray them and, with the rarest of imaginable exceptions, will remain so.
Nor does anyone here consider it an irony that the worst charge lodged by U.S. military spokespeople against their guerrilla enemies, whose recruits obviously can’t take to the skies, is that they use “human shields” as a defense. This transgression against “the law of war” is typical of any outgunned guerrilla force that, in Mao Zedong’s dictum, sees immense benefit in “swimming” in a “sea” of civilians. If they didn’t do so and fought like members of a regular army, they would, of course, be slaughtered. This is considered, however implicitly, a sign of ultimate cowardice. On the other hand, while a drone pilot cannot (yet) get a combat award citation for “valor,” a jet fighter pilot can and no one—here at least—sees anything strange or cowardly about a form of warfare that guarantees the American side quite literal, godlike invulnerability.
War by its nature is often asymmetrical. The retreat that turns into a rout that turns into a slaughter is a relative commonplace of battle. But it cannot be war, as anyone has ever understood the word, if one side is never in danger. And yet that is American air war as it has developed since World War II.
It’s a long path from knightly aerial jousting to air war as… well, what? We have no language for it, because accurate labels would prove deflating, pejorative, and exceedingly uncomfortable. You would perhaps need to speak of cadets at the Air Force Academy being prepared for “air slaughter” or “air assassination,” depending on the circumstances.
From those cadets to the secretary of defense to reporters covering our wars, no one here is likely to accept the taking of the “war” out of air war. And because of that, it is—conveniently—almost impossible for Americans to imagine how American-style war must seem to those in the lands where we fight. From the point of view of Afghans, Pakistanis, or other potential target peoples, those drones buzzing in the sky must seem very much like real-life versions of the Predator, that sci-fi alien hunter of human prey, or a Terminator, that machine version of the same. They must, that is, seem alien and implacable like so many malign gods. After all, the weaponry from those planes is loosed without recourse. No one on the ground can do a thing to prevent it and little to defend themselves. And often enough the missiles and bombs kill the innocent along with those our warriors consider the guilty.
To take one example, among many, consider the story behind this New York Times headline: “Nine Afghan Boys Collecting Firewood Killed by NATO Helicopters.” On March 1, 2011, in Afghanistan’s Kunar Province, ten boys, including two sets of brothers, were collecting wood for their families when the predators—this time American helicopters evidently looking for insurgents who had rocketed a nearby American base—arrived. Only one of the boys survived. He described the experience as one of being “hunted”—as the Predator hunts humans or human hunters stalk animals. They “hovered over us,” he said, “scanned us, and we saw a green flash.” Then the helicopters rose and began firing. For this particular nightmare, war commander General David Petraeus apologized directly to Afghan president Hamid Karzai, who has for years fruitlessly denounced U.S. and NATO air operations that have killed Afghan civilians. When an angered Karzai refused to accept his apology, Secretary of Defense Gates, on a surprise visit to the country, apologized as well, as did President Obama. And that was that—for the Americans.
Forget for a moment what this incident tells us about a form of warfare in which helicopter pilots, reasonably close to the ground (and modestly more vulnerable than pilots in planes), can’t tell boys with sticks from insurgents with guns. The crucial thing to keep in mind is that, no matter how many apologies may be offered afterwards, this can’t stop. According to the Wall Street Journal, death by helicopter is, in fact, on the rise. It’s in the nature of this kind of warfare. In fact, Afghan civilians have repeatedly, even repetitiously, been blown away from the air, with or without apologies, since 2001.
In the weeks that preceded the killing of those boys, for instance, a “NATO”—these are usually American—air attack took out four Afghan security guards protecting the work of a road construction firm and wounded a fifth, according to the police chief of Helmand Province. A similar “deeply regrettable incident” took out an Afghan army soldier, his wife, and his four children in Nangarhar Province. And a third, also in Kunar Province, wiped out 65 civilians, including women and children, according to Afghan government officials. Visiting a hospital afterward, Karzai wept as he held a child whose leg had been amputated after being wounded in the attack.
The U.S. military did not weep. Instead, it rejected this claim of civilian deaths, insisting as it often does that the dead were “insurgents.” It simply announced—and this is typical—that it was “investigating” the incident. General Petraeus managed to further offend Afghan officials when he visited the presidential palace in Kabul and reportedly claimed that some of the wounded children might have suffered burns not in an air attack but from their parents as punishment for bad behavior and were being counted in the casualty figures only to make them look worse.
Over the years, Afghan civilian casualties from the air have waxed and waned, depending on how much air power American commanders were willing to call in, but they have never ceased. As history tells us, air power and civilian deaths are inextricably bound together. They can’t be separated, no matter how much anyone talks about “surgical” strikes and precision bombing. It’s simply the barbaric essence, the very nature of this kind of war, to kill noncombatants.
One question sometimes raised about such casualties in Afghanistan is this: according to UN statistics, Taliban fighters (via roadside bombs and suicide bombers) kill far more civilians, including women and children, than do NATO forces, so why do the U.S.-caused deaths stick so in Afghan craws when we periodically investigate, apologize, and even pay survivors for their losses? New York Times reporter Alissa J. Rubin, puzzling over this, offered the following answer: “[T]hose that are caused by NATO troops appear to reverberate more deeply because of underlying animosity about foreigners in the country.” This seems reasonable as far as it goes, but don’t discount what air power adds to the foreignness of the situation.
Consider what the twenty-year-old brother of two of the dead boys from the Kunar helicopter attack told the Wall Street Journal in a phone interview: “The only option I have is to pick up a Kalashnikov, RPG [rocket-propelled grenade], or a suicide vest to fight.”
Whatever the Taliban may be, they remain part of Afghan society. They are there on the ground. They kill and they commit barbarities, but they suffer, too. In our version of air “war,” however, the killing and the dying are perfectly and precisely, even surgically, separated. We kill, they die. It’s that simple. Sometimes the ones we target to die do so, sometimes others stand in their stead. But no matter. We then deny, argue, investigate, apologize, and continue. We are, in that sense, implacable.
And one more thing: since we are incapable of thinking of ourselves as predators, no less emotionless Terminators, it becomes impossible for us to see that our air “war” on terror is, in reality, a machine for creating what we then call “terrorists.” It is part of an American Global War for Terror. In other words, although air power has long been held up as part of the solution to terrorism, and though the American military now regularly boasts about the enemy body counts it produces, and the precision with which it does so, all of that, even when accurate, is also a kind of delusion.
So count on this: there will be no more Top Guns. No knights of the air. No dogfights and sky-jousts. No valor. Just one-sided slaughter and targeted assassinations. That is where air power has ended up. Live with it.