Page 1 of 2 DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA
The dictionary of empire-speak
By Tom Engelhardt
Sometimes, it's the everyday things, the ones that fly below the radar, that
matter.
Here, according to Bloomberg News, is part of United States' Secretary of
Defense Robert Gates' recent testimony on the Afghan war before the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee:
US goals in Afghanistan must be "modest,
realistic", and "above all, there must be an Afghan face on this war", Gates
said. "The Afghan people must believe this is their war and we are there to
help them. If they think we are there for our own purposes, then we will go the
way of every other foreign army that has been in Afghanistan."
Now,
in our world, a statement like this seems so obvious, so
reasonable as to be beyond comment. And yet, stop a moment and think about this
part of it: "there must be an Afghan face on this war". US military and
civilian officials used an equivalent phrase in 2005-2006 when things were
going really, really wrong in Iraq. It was then commonplace - and no less
unremarked on - for them to urgently suggest that an "Iraqi face" be put on
events there.
Evidently back in vogue for a different war, the phrase is revelatory - and
oddly blunt. As an image, there's really only one way to understand it (not
that anyone here stops to do so). After all, what does it mean to "put a face"
on something that assumedly already has a face? In this case, it has to mean
putting an Afghan mask over what we know to be the actual "face" of the Afghan
war - ours - a foreign face that men like Gates recognize, quite correctly, is
not the one most Afghans want to see. It's hardly surprising that the secretary
of defense would pick up such a phrase, part of Washington's everyday arsenal
of words and images when it comes to geopolitics, power, and war.
And yet, make no mistake, this is empire-speak, American-style. It's the
language - behind which lies a deeper structure of argument and thought - that
is essential to Washington's vision of itself as a planet-straddling Goliath.
Think of that "Afghan face"/mask, in fact, as part of the flotsam and jetsam
that regularly bubbles up from the American imperial unconscious.
Of course, words create realities even though such language, in all its
strangeness, essentially passes unnoticed here. Largely uncommented upon, it
helps normalize American practices in the world, comfortably shielding us from
certain global realities; but it also has the potential to blind us to those
realities, which, in perilous times, can be dangerous indeed. So let's consider
just a few entries in what might be thought of as The Dictionary of American
Empire-Speak.
War hidden in plain sight: There has recently been much reporting
on, and even some debate here about, the efficacy of the Barack Obama
administration's decision to increase the intensity of US Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) missile attacks from drone aircraft in what Washington, in a
newly-coined neo-logism reflecting a widening war, now called "Af-Pak" - the
Pashtun tribal borderlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Since August 2008, more
than 30 such missile attacks have been launched on the Pakistani side of that
border against suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban targets. The pace of attacks has
actually risen since Obama entered the Oval Office, as have casualties from the
missile strikes, as well as popular outrage in Pakistan over the attacks.
Thanks to Senator Diane Feinstein, we also know that, despite strong official
Pakistani government protests, someone official in that country is doing more
than looking the other way while they occur. As the senator revealed recently,
at least some of the CIA's unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) cruising the skies
over Afghanistan and Pakistan are evidently stationed at Pakistani bases. We
learned recently as well that American special operations units are now
regularly making forays inside Pakistan "primarily to gather intelligence";
that a unit of 70 American special forces advisors, a "secret task force,
overseen by the United States Central Command and special operations command",
is now aiding and training Pakistani army and Frontier Corps paramilitary
troops, again inside Pakistan; and that, despite (or perhaps, in part, because
of) these American efforts, the influence of the Pakistani Taliban is actually
expanding, even as Pakistan threatens to melt down.
Mystifyingly enough, however, this Pakistani part of the American war in
Afghanistan is still referred to in major US papers as a "covert war". As news
about it pours out, who it's being hidden from is one of those questions no one
bothers to ask.
On February 20, the New York Times' Mark Mazzetti and David E Sanger typically
wrote:
With two missile strikes over the past week, the Obama
administration has expanded the covert war run by the Central Intelligence
Agency inside Pakistan, attacking a militant network seeking to topple the
Pakistani government ... Under standard policy for covert operations, the CIA
strikes inside Pakistan have not been publicly acknowledged either by the Obama
administration or the [George W] Bush administration.
On
February 25, Mazzetti and Helene Cooper reported that new CIA head Leon Panetta
essentially bragged to reporters that "the agency's campaign against militants
in Pakistan's tribal areas was the 'most effective weapon' the Obama
administration had to combat al-Qaeda's top leadership ... Mr Panetta stopped
short of directly acknowledging the missile strikes, but he said that
'operational efforts' focusing on Qaeda leaders had been successful." Siobhan
Gorman of the Wall Street Journal reported the next day that Panetta said the
attacks are "probably the most effective weapon we have to try to disrupt
al-Qaeda right now." She added, "Mr Obama and National Security Adviser James
Jones have strongly endorsed their use, [Panetta] said."
Uh, covert war? These "covert, operational efforts" have been front-page news
in the Pakistani press for months, they were part of the US presidential
campaign debates, and they certainly can't be a secret for the Pashtuns in
those border areas who must see drone aircraft overhead relatively regularly,
or experience the missiles arriving in their neighborhoods.
In the US, "covert war" has long been a term for wars like the US-backed Contra
war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in the 1980s, which were openly
discussed, debated and often lauded in this country. To a large extent, when
aspects of these wars have actually been "covert" - that is, purposely hidden
from anyone - it has been from the American public, not the enemies being
warred upon. At the very least, however, such language, however threadbare,
offers official Washington a kind of "plausible deniability" when it comes to
thinking about what kind of an "American face" we present to the world.
Imperial naming practices: In our press, anonymous US officials
now point with pride to the increasing "precision" and "accuracy" of those
drone missile attacks in taking out Taliban or al-Qaeda figures without
(supposedly) taking out the tribespeople who live in the same villages or
neighboring compounds. Such pieces lend our air war an almost sterile quality.
They tend to emphasize the extraordinary lengths to which planners go to avoid
"collateral damage". To many Americans, it must then seem strange, even
irrational, that perfectly non-fundamentalist Pakistanis should be quite so
outraged about attacks aimed at the world's worst terrorists.
On the other hand, consider for a moment the names of those drones now
regularly in the skies over "Pashtunistan". These are no less regularly
published in our press to no comment at all. The most basic of the armed drones
goes by the name of Predator, a moniker which might as well have come directly
from those nightmarish sci-fi movies about an alien that feasts on humans.
Undoubtedly, however, it was used in the way Colonel Michael Steele of the
101st Airborne Division meant it when he exhorted his brigade deploying to Iraq
(according to Thomas E Ricks' new book The Gamble) to remember: "You're
the predator."
The Predator drone is armed with "only" two missiles. The more advanced drone,
originally called the Predator B, now being deployed to the skies over
Afghanistan and Pakistan, has been dubbed the Reaper - as in the Grim Reaper.
Now, there's only one thing such a "hunter-killer UAV" could be reaping, and
you know just what that is: lives. It can be armed with up to 14 missiles (or
four missiles and two 500-pound bombs), which means it packs quite a deadly
wallop.
Oh, by the way, those missiles are named as well. They're Hellfire missiles.
So, if you want to consider the nature of this covert war in terms of names
alone: Predators and Reapers are bringing down the fire from some satanic hell
on the peasants, fundamentalist guerrillas and terrorists of the Afghanistan
and Pakistan's border regions.
In Washington, when the Afghanistan and Pakistan war is discussed, it's in the
bloodless, bureaucratic language of "global counter-insurgency" or "irregular
warfare" (IW), of "soft power", "hard power" and "smart power". But flying over
the Pashtun wildlands is the blunt-edged face of predation and death, ready at
a moment's notice to deliver hellfire to those below.
Imperial arguments: Let's pursue this just a little further.
Faced with rising numbers of civilian casualties from US and North Atlantic
Treaty Organization air strikes in Afghanistan and an increasingly outraged
Afghan public, American officials tend to place the blame for most sky-borne
"collateral damage" squarely on the Taliban. As Joint Chiefs chairman Admiral
Michael Mullen bluntly explained recently, "[T]he enemy hides behind
civilians." Hence, so this empire-speak argument goes, dead civilians are
actually the Taliban's doing.
US military and civilian spokespeople have long accused Taliban guerrillas of
using civilians as "shields", or even of purposely luring devastating air
strikes down on Afghan wedding parties to create civilian casualties and so
inflame the sensibilities of rural Afghanistan. This commonplace argument has
two key features: a claim that they made us do it (kill civilians) and the
implication that the Taliban fighters "hiding" among innocent villagers or
wedding revelers are so many cowards, willing to put their fellow Pashtuns at
risk rather than come out and fight like men - and, of course, given the
firepower arrayed against them, die.
The US media regularly record this argument without reflecting on it. In this
country, in fact, the evil of combatants "hiding" among civilians seems so
self-evident, especially given the larger evil of the Taliban and al-Qaeda,
that no one thinks twice about it.
And yet like so much of empire-speak on a one-way planet, this argument is
distinctly uni-directional. What's good for the guerrilla goose, so to speak,
is inapplicable to the imperial gander. To illustrate, consider the American
"pilots" flying those unmanned Predators and Reapers. We don't know exactly
where all of them are (other than not in the drones), but some are certainly at
Nellis Air Force Base just outside Las Vegas.
In other words, were the Taliban guerrillas to leave the protection of those
civilians and come out into the open, there would be no enemy to fight in the
usual sense, not even a predatory one. The pilot firing that Hellfire missile
into some Pakistani border village or compound is, after all, using the UAV's
cameras, including by next year a new system hair-raisingly dubbed "Gorgon
Stare", to locate his target and then, via console, as in a single-shooter
video game, firing the missile, possibly from many thousands of miles away.
And yet nowhere in our world will you find anyone making the argument that
those pilots are in "hiding" like so many cowards. Such a thought seems absurd
to us, as it would if it were applied to the F-16 pilots taking off from
aircraft carriers off the Afghan coast or the B-1 pilots flying out of unnamed
Middle Eastern bases or the Indian Ocean island base of Diego Garcia. And yet,
whatever those pilots may do in Afghan skies, unless they experience a
mechanical malfunction, they are in no more danger than if they, too, were
somewhere outside Las Vegas. In the last seven years, a few helicopters, but no
planes, have gone down in Afghanistan.
When the Afghan mujahideen fought the Soviets in the 1980s, the CIA supplied
them with hand-held Stinger missiles, the most advanced surface-to-air missile
in the US arsenal, and they did indeed start knocking Soviet helicopters and
planes out of the skies (which proved the beginning of the end for the
Russians). The Afghan or Pakistani Taliban or al-Qaeda terrorists have no such
capability today, which means, if you think about it, that what we here imagine
as an "air war" involves none of the dangers we would normally associate with
war. Looked at in another light, those missile strikes and bombings are really
one-way acts of slaughter.
The Taliban's tactics are, of course, the essence of guerrilla warfare, which
always involves an asymmetrical battle against more powerful armies and
weaponry, and which, if successful, always depends on the ability of the
guerrilla to blend into the environment, natural and human, or, as Chinese
Communist leader Mao Zedong so famously put it, to "swim" in the "sea of the
people".
If you imagine your enemy simply using the villagers of Afghanistan as
"shields" or "hiding" like so many cowards among them, you are speaking the
language of imperial power but also blinding yourself (or the American public)
to the actual realities of the war you're fighting.
Imperial jokes: In October 2008, Rafael Correa, the president of
Ecuador, refused to renew the US lease at Manta Air Base, one of at least 761
foreign bases, macro to micro, that the US garrisons worldwide. Correa
reportedly said: "We'll renew the base on one condition: that they let us put a
base in Miami - an Ecuadorian base. If there's no problem having foreign
soldiers on a country's soil, surely they'll let us have an Ecuadorian base in
the United States."
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