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.
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 nutshelclass="underline" 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.