War, Technology, Anthropology

Koen Stroeken

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780857455871
• eBook ISBN: 9780857455888
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Intelligence e spionaggio

Technologies of the allied warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan, such as remote-controlled drones and night vision goggles, allow the user to "virtualize" human targets. This coincides with increased civilian casualties and a perpetuation of the very insecurity these technologies are meant to combat. This concise volume of research and reflections from different regions across Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa, observes how anthropology operates as a technology of war. It tackles recent theories of humans in society colluding with imperialist claims, including anthropologists who have become  involved professionally in warfare through their knowledge of "cultures," renamed as "human terrain systems." The chapters link varied yet crucial domains of inquiry: from battlefields technologies, military-driven scientific policy, and economic warfare, to martyrdom cosmology shifts, media coverage of "distant" wars, and the virtualizing techniques and "war porn" soundtracks of the gaming industry.

PART I: PERPETUATING WAR

DRONES IN THE TRIBAL ZONE

Virtual War and Losing Hearts and Minds
in the Af-Pak War

Jeffrey A. Sluka

You can't say civilization don't advance…in every war they kill you in a new way.

—Will Rogers

This essay considers the civilian casualties caused by the use of air strikes, particularly remote-controlled drones, in the current wars in the tribal zones of Afghanistan and Pakistan. I argue that these tactics of virtual counterinsurgency, touted as being highly discriminate and effective (literally able to “put warheads on foreheads”) and as representing the technological cutting edge of a revolution in advanced modern warfare capabilities, have in practice resulted in a collateral disaster that has effectively ensured that the ‘battle for hearts and minds’ among these communities—and hence the ‘global war on terrorism’ in the so-called Af-Pak war—has been lost.

As the war in Afghanistan has grown and spread to Pakistan, it has increasingly relied on air power, and, consequently, the number of civilian casualties has rapidly risen. In 2008, Human Rights Watch reported that “[c]ivilian deaths in Afghanistan from US and NATO air strikes nearly tripled from 2006 to 2007” and warned that this was “exacerbating the problem and fuelling a public backlash” (Human Rights Watch 2008). Nonetheless, in response to increasing Taliban attacks, the US-led forces retaliated with massive aerial bombing campaigns and large-scale household raids. The number of insurgent attacks increased, the number of civilian casualties skyrocketed, and in the 15 months of this operation more civilians were killed than in the previous four years combined. While this surge, little noted by the media, failed miserably, the first thing that the newly elected Obama regime did was to launch another one.

Today, most Afghans say that they feel occupied by the American and allied foreign troops and threatened by the Taliban. The majority now regard the US and coalition forces as they did the Russians—as foreign, anti-Muslim invaders—and they strongly oppose sending in more troops. There has been a steady decline in support for the US and allied forces: in 2005, 80 percent of Afghans supported the presence of foreign troops, but by February 2009 fewer than half did (The Week, 27 February 2009).

In Pakistan, the war escalated in May 2009, when the Pakistan Army, under pressure from the US, launched large-scale counterinsurgency operations in the tribal borderlands in the northwest of the country. This campaign killed and maimed thousands of civilians and created a huge humanitarian catastrophe, including 2 million refugees. At the same time, the CIA stepped up a campaign of airborne attacks by unmanned drones in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, inhabited primarily by Pashtun tribes, which they had begun in January 2006. These attacks have killed hundreds of civilians, uniting the Pashtun against the US and recruiting and increasing popular support for the Taliban. The strikes are deeply unpopular in Pakistan, and this tactic is backfiring by sowing public anger and fueling anti-Americanism, while failing to defeat the militants. A poll conducted in July and August 2009 showed that Pakistanis are increasingly distrustful and suspicious of America, with 80 percent opposed to cooperating with the US any longer in its ‘war on terrorism’, and 76 percent opposed to the use of the drone strikes. This poll excluded the country's tribal areas, where the opposition would have been even greater (Hayden 2009: 23).

The Af-Pak War Body Count

We have no idea exactly how many civilians have been killed or wounded by the US and its allies in the Af-Pak war, but there is no doubt that the ‘collateral damage’ has been widespread. The ‘fog of war’ makes counting the dead difficult, and ethnographic experience in war zones suggests that all official figures on civilian casualties are likely to be undercounts. In Afghanistan, there have been approximately 21,250 total civilian casualties, with 7,589 killed and 13,660 seriously wounded.¹ In Pakistan, between 2003 and 2011, the war on terrorism probably killed about 9,000 civilians.²

In 2008, according to Afghanistan Rights Monitor, a Kabul-based watchdog organization, 3,917 civilians were killed—more than two-thirds in rebel attacks, 1,100 by Afghan and foreign forces, and about 680 in air strikes. In 2009, a UN report in July said that in the first half of the year about 1,800 civilians were killed: the Taliban and tribal warlords were responsible for about 1,000 deaths, and 700 civilians were killed by international and Afghan forces, including 455 who died in air strikes. It also reported that the war is spreading and that the number of civilians being killed is currently doubling at the rate of every two years (Sunday Star-Times, 19 July 2009).

Death from Above

The US Air Force (USAF) has been increasingly relying on ‘unmanned aerial vehicles’ (UAVs) or drones, primarily the Predator and the Reaper. Launched from Afghanistan, these ‘ghost planes’ are flown by ‘joystick pilots’ located halfway around the world in the continental US. As Washington and the military see it, the ideal use of this system is to ‘pick off’ terrorist leaders. The pilots pinpoint their targets by watching streams of real-time video, taken by advanced surveillance systems on the drones. Most of the drones are also armed with Hellfire missiles or ‘smart bombs’, which the pilots can fire with the push of a button, once they have spotted the targets on their video screens. Although it takes up to 17 steps to fire a missile and incinerate those below, killing is just a matter of entering a computer command: it is like pushing ‘control-alt-delete’, and the target dies.³

By 2011, these hunter-killer drones were performing 50 combat air patrols at any one time, a number that is expected to increase to 65 by 2013. In 2009, the USAF trained more joystick pilots than new fighter and bomber pilots, creating a “sustainable career path” for USAF officers (Kaplan 2009). One Predator ‘pilot-from-afar’ has commented that “It's not as potent an emotion as being on the battlefield,” but “[i]t's like a video game. It can get a little bloodthirsty. But it's fucking cool.” While the pilots are no longer at risk, the experience of fighting from home bases has brought new psychological twists to war: “You see Americans [or civilians?—J.S.] killed in front of your eyes and then have to go to a PTA [Parent Teacher Association] meeting,” said another pilot (quoted in Singer 2009: 347).

Engelhardt (2009b) observes that the drones are the “wonder weapon of the moment,” and “you can already see the military-industrial-robotics complex in formation.” In fact, as Der Derian (2009: xxxvi) describes, they are already part of a massive and expanding “military-industrial-media-entertainment network.” The hype and hubris surrounding this technology is huge, and the mainstream media is full of glowing reports on the drones, some of which imply that their use could win the war on terrorism by themselves. For example, an April 2009 report stated that the drones were killing Taliban and Al-Qaeda leaders and that “the rest have begun fighting among themselves out of panic and suspicion. ‘If you were to continue on this pace…Al-Qaeda is dead’” (The Week, 3 April 2009). in May 2009, in an uncritical 60 Minutes report, an officer in charge of USAF drone operations was asked if there were ever mistakes in the drone attacks: “What if you get it wrong?” “We don't” was his response.

The USAF claims that its priority is to target insurgents with precision while avoiding civilian casualties. It strongly asserts that it is very concerned about civilian casualties and takes extreme measures to avoid them. It says that there is always a military lawyer on duty, whose job is to provide advice regarding the Law of Armed Conflict, which prohibits the intentional targeting of civilians and requires militaries to minimize risks to them. Supposedly, a strict NATO protocol requires high-level approval for air strikes when civilians are known to be in or near Taliban targets. When civilians are detected, strikes are to be called off. The USAF contends that it is extremely precise and that it has terminated many operations when it appeared that civilian casualties might result.

The drones are promoted as the ‘future of war’, the ‘only good thing’ to come out of the war on terrorism, and an effective and highly discriminate counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency weapon. Virtually no one doubts that robots will eventually occupy a central role in the US military. As Singer (2009) has shown, it is an unprecedented revolution in military affairs. That there is virtually no limit to the extraordinary hype about these weapons as the “greatest, weirdest, coolest hardware in the American arsenal” was recognized in an article in Newsweek in September 2009, which categorized the publicity about drones as representing “weapons porn” (Graham 2009; see also Satia 2009).

Critique of the Drone War

This hype cannot be believed: the evidence shows that it deals in sheer fantasy, if not literally science fiction, and that there have been many mistakes. In particular, the drone attacks in Pakistan, which have been touted as the most successful, have in fact been responsible for the most civilian casualties. Of the 60 Predator strikes in Pakistan between January 2006 and April 2009, only 10 hit their actual targets and 687 civilians were killed.⁴ Pakistan Body Count, which tracks drone casualties, says that by the end of March 2011, 2,205 civilians had been killed and 909 seriously injured, ⁵ but conservative Western sources claim that the figure killed is from 290 to 461.⁶ In April 2009, David Kilcullen, the anthropologist dubbed by the media as a ‘counter-insurgency guru’, advised the US Congress that the drone attacks in Pakistan are backfiring and should be stopped. He said: “Since 2006, we've killed 14 senior Al-Qaeda leaders using drone strikes; in the same period, we've killed 700 Pakistani civilians in the same area. The drone strikes are highly unpopular. They are deeply aggravating to the population. And they've given rise to a feeling of anger that coalesces the population around the extremists” (Naiman 2009). Kilcullen even characterized the drone attacks as “immoral,” because the ‘kill ratio’ has been 50 civilians for every militant killed—a ‘hit rate’ of 2 percent, or 98 percent civilian casualties—which is hardly precision killing.

The drone strikes have caused thousands of civilian casualties, have had a particular affinity for hitting weddings and funerals, and are seriously fueling the insurgency. A 2007 UN report concluded that US air strikes were among the principal motivations for suicide attackers in Afghanistan (Bergen and Tiedemann 2007). At the end of 2008, a survey of 42 Taliban fighters revealed that 12 had seen family members killed in air strikes and 6 had joined the insurgency after such attacks (Gopal 2009). Far more who have not joined have offered their support. It has also been reported that the drone strikes in Pakistan “are creating turmoil in the tribal areas. A witch-hunt against suspected spies has resulted in the deaths of at least a dozen people in North Waziristan, many of them by beheading” (Yousafzai and Hosenball 2009: 35). Even when the air strikes have succeeded in killing militant leaders, in many cases this has simply turned them into martyrs (MacKenzie and Saber 2009).

To President Obama and most Americans, the drones are seen as terrorist-killers, while in Afghanistan and Pakistan they are viewed as fearsome indiscriminate killers of civilians. From the imperial, ‘top-down’ perspective, remote-controlled assassination drones are perceived as a fantastically successful new weapon, right out of science fiction. But from the ‘bottom-up’ perspective of the targeted population in the tribal zones, it has been experienced as a deeply flawed weapon that they have come to fear and resent. Furthermore, the psychology of aerial attack—of death from above—is a psychology of state terror. Many Afghans now say that they would rather have the Taliban back in power than nervously eye the skies every day (Gopal 2009). A villager who survived a drone attack in North Waziristan explained that even children at play are acutely conscious of drones flying overhead (Kelly 2009). For many, the much-touted sophistication of this ‘high technology’ only makes the civilian deaths more galling (Baker 2009). Psychologically, Afghans and Pakistanis in the tribal zone view the drones only as predators; they will never see these weapons as their ‘protectors’.

Virtual war dehumanizes the victims and desensitizes the perpetrators of violence, lowering the moral and psychological barriers to killing. In the US today, young people play video games developed by the military—such as America's Army and Close Combat: First to Fight—that enable them to kill casually the simulated human beings whose world they control. In this way, the militarization and ‘weaponization’ of culture is directly reflected in the conjunction of entertainment and military media (see also Allen, this volume). This socialization of virtual war means that the next step to killing real human beings is very small, because the change is only psychological and moral; the physical process of remote-controlled violence is exactly the same, regardless of whether the victims are real or simulated. As Ignatieff (2000: 4) has warned: “If war becomes unreal to the citizens of modern democracies, will they care enough to restrain and control the violence exercised in their name? Will they do so, if they and their sons and daughters are spared the hazards of combat?”

Conclusion

Civilian casualties are the single biggest issue in Afghanistan and Pakistan because, as everyone agrees, including the generals running the Af-Pak war, military success is impossible without wining the ‘hearts and minds’ of the people (Sluka 2009). In July 2009, in response to the rising number of civilian casualties, General Stanley McChrystal sought to change the emphasis from killing insurgents to protecting civilians. He ordered his troops to avoid calling in air strikes if civilian lives were at risk, to show the local people that the US forces are there to protect them. However, at the time of this writing, the US is scrambling for another ‘surge’ solution based on an escalation of the conflict, one that relies on sending in more troops and using more drone and other airborne attacks. This tactic is bound to fail, since it is just what got us to where we are now. The use of air power has already undermined public support for the governments in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and continued aerial bombing will result in more civilian casualties, leading to more anger. The consequence will be more support and recruits for the insurgents and the extension of a long, losing war. Dropping bombs that kill civilians angers whole populations and creates ill will, and, as international mediator John Paul Lederach has asserted, bombing Taliban and Al-Qaeda targets “is like hitting a mature dandelion with a golf club. It just ensures another generation of Al-Qaeda” (cited in Dodge 2009).

The fact that the war effort itself now fuels the insurgency and continues the cycle of violence proves that there is no military solution in Afghanistan or Pakistan. At this point, Afghanistan is certainly a failed state, and nuclear-armed Pakistan has become dangerously destabilized as well. Thus, the crucial factors that the US government and military identify for a successful counter-insurgency campaign—a stable local government that has popular support and the ability to win the hearts and minds of the people—are never likely to be achieved.

President Obama has taken ownership of the Afghanistan war, calling it “a war of necessity” that is fundamental to the “defense of our people” (Leon 2009). He has ‘rebranded’ George W. Bush's ‘global war on terrorism’ as ‘overseas contingent operations’—a ‘virtual’ expression for ‘wars’ because it sounds innocuous and does not even mention the military or violence. On the other hand, the US military now refers to it as the ‘long war’. This exhibits a good dose of realism, given that the war in Afghanistan is now the second longest war in US history, after only the war in Vietnam. Obama has also chosen to follow the example of the previous administration by introducing another surge solution based on an escalation of the war. As Engelhardt (2009a) has concluded, our leaders are addicted to war: “As things go from bad to worse and the odds grow grimmer, our leaders, like the worst of gamblers, wager ever more…In the Vietnam era, there was a shorthand word for this: ‘quagmire’.”

The Obama administration has chosen to up the ante on troop numbers and drone use in Pakistan and Afghanistan, “ensur...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: War-Technology Anthropology
• Part I: Perpetuating War
• Part II: Globalizing War
• Notes on Contributors