Decades later, the United States continued to be embroiled in debate over those prisoners who remained at Guantánamo—most of whom had never appeared before a court or been tried or judged. The Republican members of Congress refused to allow Guantánamo to be closed, despite President Obama’s pledge to do so during his 2008 presidential campaign.8 President Donald Trump came into office explicitly vowing to keep Guantánamo open, even to fill it with new terrorist suspects from the war against ISIS, including US citizens.
In these contentious public debates, the voices and experiences of those who had been virtually disappeared rarely received much attention, far less certainly than the more positive filmic representations of the war on terror. Despite the fact that Slahi’s book cracked Amazon’s top one hundred bestselling books in January 2015, and was chosen for the New York Times notable books of 2015, his readership paled in comparison to the viewership of Zero Dark Thirty, a thriller movie depicting the capture and assassination of Osama bin Laden—which had over sixteen million viewers and grossed more than $132 million worldwide.9
The depiction of indefinite detention in a movie like Zero Dark Thirty shaped the American public’s imagination, not Slahi’s account. Zero Dark Thirty, and movies like it, manufacture a different truth about the counterinsurgency: namely that, however begrudgingly, brutal violence and indefinite detention pay off. The filmic representation in Zero Dark Thirty subtly convinces the viewer, slowly, patiently, of the benefits of these counterinsurgency strategies. It ultimately valorizes the techniques of modern warfare, in a number of ways. First, by convincing viewers that these methods of indefinite detention and torture are effective. Second, by making it seem that the detainees recover fully from their detention and torture. And third, by dehumanizing the detainees and valorizing the counterinsurgency operatives. Films like Zero Dark Thirty serve as the popular brief for the efficacy of detention and torture. Just treating indefinite detention or torture as an ordinary event, as a routine, daily occurrence, serve to normalize and naturalize it, as the philosopher Slavoj Žižek suggests.10 And this normalization, of course, ties neatly to the third prong of the counterinsurgency—winning the hearts and minds of the people, which we will come to in a moment.
The Predator drone armed with a Hellfire AGM-114C missile is the other principal method used to eliminate the active minority. As noted earlier, the US government began drone operations shortly after 9/11 in Afghanistan, then accelerated their use in Pakistan during the Obama administration. Drones have been deployed in waves in Yemen and Somalia as well. Under the Obama administration, a “kill list” would be drawn up every Tuesday at a weekly gathering of over one hundred national security experts to recommend to President Obama who should be targeted next—a weekly meeting that was dubbed “Terror Tuesday.”11
The mobile application, Dronestream, listed the following drone strikes for May 2016:
May 27, 2016: On Friday, in south-central Somalia, the United States fired a missile at Mr. Da’ud (Somalia) washingtonpost.com/news
May 21, 2016: Maybe it was Mr. Mansour. Several US drones lit up a car near Ahmad Wal, killing 2 people (Pakistan) nytimes.com/2016/05/22
May 19, 2016: On Thursday, in the middle of the desert, two drone missiles destroyed a car. 2 people killed (Yemen) pic.twitter.com/7vIoJV7rBI
May 12, 2016: Two people wounded. Five people killed (Somalia) nbcnews.com/news/us-news
As of April 2017, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism had documented 2,250 confirmed drone strikes, resulting in the deaths of between 6,248 and 9,019 persons, of which 736 to 1,391 were innocent civilians, including 242 to 307 children killed.12 Despite these significant civilian casualties, drone strikes continued at a constant rhythm. In fact, under President Trump, the strikes accelerated. NBC News reported twenty strikes on a single day, March 2, 2017, launched in the Yemeni governorates of Abyan, Al Bayda, and Shabwah.13 In the first four months of the Trump administration, the average monthly rate of lethal strikes in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen increased almost four-fold over the prior administration’s average.14
There is an ongoing debate among military strategists about whether drone warfare fits within the counterinsurgency paradigm. The debate, however interesting, misses the key point: counterinsurgency practice comes in different variations and any apparent contradiction regarding drone strikes reflects perfectly the internal tensions at the heart of counterinsurgency: precisely the same tensions we saw in the context of torture. Examining whether drone warfare fits into counterinsurgency theory, however, does help us better understand the deeper logic of modern warfare.
As Grégoire Chamayou points out in his book A Theory of the Drone, in a chapter titled “Counterinsurgency from the Air,” the traditionalists of counterinsurgency always argued that modern warfare was supposed to be about “boots on the ground.” From the early days of counterinsurgency theory, airpower was conventionally understood to be counterproductive to the stated goal of winning over the passive masses.15 In line with this traditional view, many commentators have argued that drone strikes do not fit within the counterinsurgency paradigm because the collateral damage inflicted by drone attacks, especially on innocent civilians, alienates the general population—an argument that, as you will recall, mirrors similar debates over the use of torture in counterinsurgency operations.
In their New York Times editorial “Death from Above, Outrage Down Below,” David Kilcullen and Andrew McDonald Exum, two counterinsurgency experts, take this view. They argue that drone strikes defy the logic of modern warfare—just as earlier airborne attacks, during the colonial wars, were counterproductive and served to alienate the local populations. “The drone strategy is similar to French aerial bombardment in rural Algeria in the 1950s,” they suggest, “and to the ‘air control’ methods employed by the British in what are now the Pakistani tribal areas in the 1920s. The historical resonance of the British effort encourages people in the tribal areas to see the drone attacks as a continuation of colonial-era policies.”16
Others, on the other hand, argue that drones fit perfectly within the counterinsurgency paradigm because the precision and the targeted nature of the drone strikes are a safer way to eradicate an active minority: they cause as few side effects or as little collateral damage as possible. Some add that the drone itself, because it is unmanned and invisible, effectively deprives the insurgents of a tangible target—in the words of Chamayou, they “deprive the enemy of an enemy.”17 As a result, the drone in this view undermines a central recruitment strategy of the insurgency.
This debate between more population-centric proponents and more enemy-centric advocates of counterinsurgency should sound familiar. It replays the controversy over the use of torture or other contested methods within the counterinsurgency paradigm. It replicates the strategic debates between the ruthless and the more decent. It rehearses the tensions between Roger Trinquier and David Galula.
Yet just as torture is central to certain versions of modern warfare, the drone strike too is just as important to certain variations of the counterinsurgency approach. Drone strikes, in effect, can serve practically all the functions of the second prong of counterinsurgency warfare. Drone strikes eliminate the identified active minority. They instill terror among everyone living near the active minority, dissuading them and anyone else who might contemplate joining the revolutionaries. They project power and infinite capability. They show who has technological superiority. As one Air Force officer says, “The real advantage of unmanned aerial systems is that they allow you to project power without projecting vulnerability.”18 By terrifying and projecting power, drones dissuade the population from joining the insurgents.
And drones surely are terrorizing—but that, again, is a double-edged sword. As Kilcullen and Exum write, “the drone war has created a siege mentality among Pakistani civilians.” They add: “The strikes are now exciting visceral opposition across a broad spectrum of Pakistani opinion in Punjab and Sindh, the nation’s two
most populous provinces. Covered extensively by the news media, drone attacks are popularly believed to have caused even more civilian casualties than is actually the case. The persistence of these attacks on Pakistani territory offends people’s deepest sensibilities, alienates them from their government, and contributes to Pakistan’s instability.”19
In July 2016, the Obama administration released a report estimating the number of civilian casualties resulting from its drone operations outside conventional war zones, such as Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. The report included drone strikes in Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen during the period from 2009 to 2015—countries that were not theatres of war for the United States—and therefore for which strikes would have to have been justified as targeted assassinations in furtherance of self-defense. The Obama administration reported between 64 to 116 civilian bystander fatalities and between 2,372 and 2,581 deaths of purportedly terrorist militants during the course of 473 strikes outside of active war areas over the period from January 20, 2009, to December 31, 2015.20
In other words, during the period, there were 64 to 116 officially recognized innocent civilian deaths that were bystander deaths for our—Americans’—self-defense outside a theater of war. The Obama administration made a clear distinction between drones used in conventional war zones in situations of armed conflict and drones used outside these areas in “the exercise of a state’s inherent right of self-defense.” The administration identified these situations as presenting a “continuing, imminent threat to US persons” and where there is a “near certainty” of avoiding civilian casualties.21
Western NGOs that document civilian casualties claimed these numbers underestimated the true number of civilian deaths. Independent agencies estimated the number at between 200 to 800 civilian casualties, outside of war zones, since 2009. Human Rights Watch, for instance, investigated seven deadly drones strikes, a small portion of the 473 acknowledged by the Obama administration, and documented civilian deaths reaching 57 or 59 killed—nearly as many as the lower end of the administration’s estimate regarding all of the acknowledged strikes. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism investigated closely 12 strikes in 2012 and documented 57 civilian deaths.22 The Human Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School and the Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies estimate that the US government has only acknowledged one-fifth, or 20 percent, of its lethal strikes.23
These numbers also do not include those civilians killed in war zones, such as in Afghanistan or Iraq. In Afghanistan alone, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism documented between 1,544 confirmed drone strikes that have killed a total of between 2,580 and 3,376 persons, of which 142 to 200 were bystander civilians and between 24 and 49 were children, occurring over a period of just 27 months from January 2015 to April 2017.24
Those in the affected countries typically receive far higher casualty reports. The Pakistan press, for instance, reported that there are about 50 civilians killed for every militant assassinated, resulting in a hit rate of about 2 percent. As Kilcullen and Exum argue, regardless of the exact number, “every one of these dead noncombatants represents an alienated family, a new desire for revenge, and more recruits for a militant movement that has grown exponentially even as drone strikes have increased.”25
To those living in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and neighboring countries, the Predator drones are terrifying. But again—and this is precisely the central tension at the heart of counterinsurgency theory—the terror may be a productive tool for modern warfare. It may dissuade people from joining the active minority. It may convince some insurgents to abandon their efforts. Terror, as we have seen, is by no means antithetical to the counterinsurgency paradigm. Some would argue it is a necessary means.
Drones are by no means a flawless weapons system even for their proponents. There has been some backlash within the US military. A few drone operators came out and criticized drone warfare, publicizing the psychological trauma they experienced. In their documentary titled National Bird, filmmakers Wim Wenders and Errol Morris explore the psychological damage that drones may inflict even on those who administer them in utter safety. The director, Sonia Kennebeck, emphasizes, with reference to the drone operators, “They talk about how difficult it is to be in the US and be deployed and fighting, while still being at home in safety.” She goes on to explain: “I think the human mind has an issue dealing with that, because you go into this secret environment and you’re in a real warzone: you’re killing people. Then you go home and sit at the dinner table with your family. It’s schizophrenic in a way, to work like that. Your family doesn’t have a clue and you’re not allowed to talk to them about your experiences.”26
Similarly, in the context of torture, some men have come out and exposed the psychological effects of torturing others. Eric Fair, who worked for a private security contractor, CACI, was a civilian interrogator during the early months of the war in Iraq tasked with administering the mechanical aspects of the enhanced interrogation program: waking detainees up to ensure sleep deprivation, disrobing the detainees, making them stand and experience stress positions, slapping them—those menial tasks of enhanced interrogation that had to be done by someone. Fair, who did them for three months in early 2004, soon realized that he was not the right man for the job, and left. He had been raised Presbyterian in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and felt that he identified more with the men who were being tortured than with the torturers. He felt that he should be tending to their needs rather than exploiting their weaknesses.
The experience nevertheless left Fair damaged. “A man with no face stares at me from the corner of a room,” Fair writes in a 2007 essay. “He pleads for help, but I’m afraid to move. He begins to cry. It is a pitiful sound, and it sickens me. He screams, but as I awaken, I realize the screams are mine. That dream, along with a host of other nightmares, has plagued me since my return from Iraq in the summer of 2004.” Fair is still haunted, he explains in his book Consequence, by “the voice of the general from the comfortable interrogation booth, the cries from the hard site, the sobs from the Palestinian chair and the sound of the old man’s head hitting the wall.”27 And the fact that the methods were rendered fully legal made little difference to him. Fair notes:
Our interrogations used approved techniques. We filed paperwork, followed guidelines, and obeyed the rules. But with every prisoner forced up against a wall, or made to stand naked in a cold cell, or prevented from falling asleep for significant periods of time, we felt less and less like decent men. And we felt less and less like Americans.28
These men—drone operators and former torturers—have offered chilling accounts.29 Their interviews and stories are haunting. Sadly, though, they are few. Of the legions of soldiers, agents, and contractors who have participated in drone strikes, torture, and terror, only a handful have spoken out about the psychological repercussions.
In the end, drones may not be flawless from a counterinsurgency perspective, but no weapon system is perfect. Drones ensure the elimination of the active minority, while serving other terrorizing goals of modern warfare. In this sense, drones must be understood as an alternative tactic to indefinite detention, disappearances, or summary executions within the framework of the counterinsurgency paradigm. In the view of many in the US government, drones are far more sanitized, virtual, and safe than the alternatives. From the perspective of the target, of course, there is hardly any distinction: there is psychological harm as well as the raw lethality of the drone with its fifteen meters of death. But to the drone operator, the harm, if any, is psychological, not directly physical. From the attacker’s perspective, the drone is a safer means—and merely a variation on the second prong of counterinsurgency.
Grégoire Chamayou asks how particular weapon systems affect both the relationship of the attacker to its enemy and, in his words, “the state’s relation to its own subjects.”30 The two aspects are linked, of course, and what Chamayou suggests is that, in the case of the Predator drone, the u
tter safety to the drone operators, the fact that they return home to their families at the end of their shift, the global reach, and the surgical nature of the drone strike have dramatically altered our social and political reality and the democratic decision to kill. It has been years since critical theory has addressed the question of drones. Perhaps the last time was when Theodor Adorno wrote about Hitler’s robot-bombs, the infamous V-1 and V-2 rockets the Nazis launched toward London.31 But new circumstances call for renewed attention.
Regarding the first question, a drone should be understood as a blended weapons system, one that ultimately functions at several levels. It shares characteristics of the German V-2 missile, to be sure, but also the French guillotine and American lethal injection. It combines safety for the attacker, with relatively precise but rapid death, and a certain anesthetizing effect—as well as, of course, utter terror. For the country administering the drone attack, it is perfectly secure. There is no risk of domestic casualties. In its rapid and apparently surgical death, it can be portrayed, like the guillotine, as almost humane. And drones have had a numbing effect on popular opinion precisely because of their purported precision and hygiene—like lethal injection has done, for the most part, in the death-penalty context. Plus, drones are practically invisible and out of sight—again, for the country using them—though, again, terrifying for the targeted communities.
Chamayou’s second question is, perhaps, the most important. This new weapons system has changed the US government’s relationship to its own citizens. There is no better evidence of this than the deliberate, targeted drone killing of US and allied nation citizens abroad—as we will see.32 It is here that we can identify a real drone effect. A conventional targeted assassination by a CIA agent, especially of a US citizen abroad, would surely shock the American conscience. It would raise political and legal issues that are simply elided by the use of a Predator drone, remote-controlled thousands of miles away. Even though there is no difference in objective and result, the novelty of the drone means it does not carry the symbolic baggage of CIA targeted assassinations and the long history of debate regarding their legality. It is not loaded with the weight of past excess.
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