The United States of Fear

by Tom Engelhardt

  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.

  Planetary Predators

  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.

  Descending from on High

  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.

  The Perfect American Weapon

  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.

  Smoking Drones

  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.

  A Pilotless Military

  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 Lad
y 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.