Human rights evidence
: The reports from Grozny in particular often made extensive use of the investigations of human rights groups of various sorts (including Russian ones), and reporters then were willing to put the acts of the Russians in Grozny (as in Afghanistan) in the context of “war crimes,” as indeed they were. In Iraq, on the other hand, while pieces on human rights reports about our occupation can sometimes be found deep in our papers, the evidence supplied by human rights groups is seldom deployed by American reporters as an evidentiary part of war pieces.
“Terrorism”
: Finally, it’s interesting to see how, in different reporting contexts and different moments, the term “terrorism” is or is not brought to bear. In Grozny, for instance, the “rebels” used “radio controlled land mines” and assassinated Chechens who worked for the Russians (just as Iraqi insurgents and terrorists explode roadside IEDs and assassinate those who work for the Americans) and yet the Chechens remained “rebels.”
On this topic, though, Afghanistan in the 1980s is of special interest. There, as Steve Coll tells us in his riveting book
Ghost Wars
, the CIA organized terror on a major scale in conjunction with the Pakistani ISI, which trained “freedom fighters” in how to mount car-bomb and even camel-bomb attacks on Soviet officers and soldiers in Russian-occupied cities (techniques personally “endorsed,” according to Coll, by CIA director William Casey). The CIA also supplied the Afghan rebels with long-range sniper rifles (meant for assassinations) and delayed-timing devices for plastic explosives. “The rebels fashioned booby-trapped bombs from gooey black contact explosives, supplied to Pakistani intelligence by the CIA, that could be molded into ordinary shapes or poured into innocent utensils.” Kabul cinemas and cultural shows were bombed, and suicide operations mounted using Arab jihadis. “Many tons of C-4 plastic explosives for sabotage operations” were shipped in, and the CIA took to supplying so-called dual-use weapons systems that could be used against military targets, “but also in terror attacks and assassinations.” Much of this was known, at least to some degree at the time (and some of it reported in press accounts), and yet the Afghans remained “freedom fighters” and a resistance movement, even after the Afghan jihad began to slip across the other Pakistani border into Indian Kashmir.
What changed? What made such people, according to our press, “terrorists”? The answer is, of course, that we became their prime enemy and target. Coll offers this observation:
Ten years later the vast training infrastructure that [the Pakistani ISI] built with the enormous budgets endorsed by NSDD-166 [the official American plan for the Afghan jihad]—the specialized camps, the sabotage training manuals, the electronic bomb detonators, and so on—would be referred to routinely in America as “terrorist infrastructure.”
At the time of its construction, however, it served a jihadist army that operated openly on the battlefield, attempted to seize and hold territory, and exercised sovereignty over civilian populations
—in Soviet Afghanistan, that is.
In the Afghan anti-Soviet war, the CIA looked favorably indeed upon the recruitment of thousands of Arab jihadists and eagerly supported a particularly unsavory and murderous Afghan extremist warlord, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who refused at the time to travel to Washington and shake the hand of our “infidel” president, Ronald Reagan. (Today, Hekmatyar fights U.S. troops in Afghanistan.) As it turned out, the “freedom fighters” fell on each other’s throats even as Kabul was being taken, and then, within years, some of them turned on their former American patrons with murderous intent. No figure tells the story better, I think, than this one: “In 1971 there had been only nine hundred madrassas [Islamic schools] in all of Pakistan. By the summer of 1988 there were about 8,000 official religious schools and an estimated 25,000 unregistered ones, many of them clustered along the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier and funded by wealthy patrons from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states.”
The Russians in Afghanistan and Chechnya were indeed brutes and committed war crimes of almost every imaginable sort. The language of the American press, watching the invading army of a former superpower turn the capital city of a small border state into utter rubble, was appropriate indeed, given what was going on. In both Afghanistan and in Iraq, on the other hand, where the American government is actively involved, reporters generally—and yes, there are always exceptions—have followed the government’s lead with the terminology—“freedom fighter” versus “terrorist”—falling into place as befit the moment, even though many of the acts being described remained the same.
The press is always seen as a weapon of war by officials, and so it has been seen by the Pentagon and official Washington. Reporters and editors obviously feel that and the pressures that flow from it in all sorts of complex ways. Whether consciously or not, it’s striking how such perceptions shade and limit even individual stories, alter small language choices, and the nature of what passes for evidence as well as news.
The Imperial Unconscious
Sometimes, it’s the everyday things, the ones that fly below the radar, that matter.
Here is an excerpt from a news story about Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’s testimony on the Afghan War before the Senate Armed Services Committee in January 2009: “U.S. 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.” U.S. military and civilian officials used an equivalent phrase in 2005 and 2006, when things were going really wrong in Iraq. It was then commonplace—and no less unremarked upon—for them to urgently suggest that an “Iraqi face” be put on events there.
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. It is 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. It also has the potential to blind us to those realities, which 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 about, the efficacy of the Obama administration’s decision to increase the intensity of CIA missile attacks from drone aircraft in what Washington, in a newly coined neologism reflecting a widening war, calls “Af-Pak”—the Pashtun tribal borderlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan. The pace of such attacks has risen since Barack 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 Dianne 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, at least some of the CIA’s unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) cruising the skies over Af-Pak are evidently stationed at Pakistani bases. We also learned that American special operations units are now regularly making forays inside Pakistan “primarily to gather intelligence”; that a unit of seventy American Special Forces advisers, a “secret task force, overseen by the United States Central Command and Special Operations Command,” is 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 U.S. 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, 2009, Mark Mazzetti and David E. Sanger of the
New York Times
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 C.I.A. strikes inside Pakistan have not
been publicly acknowledged either by the Obama administration or the Bush administration.”
On February 25, 2009, 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.”
“Covert” war? These “operational efforts” have been front-page news in the Pakistani press for months, they were part of the U.S. 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 United States, “covert war” has long been a term for wars that were openly discussed, debated, and often lauded in this country, such as the U.S.-backed Contra War against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in the 1980s. To a large extent, when aspects of these wars have actually been “covert”—that is, purposely hidden from anyone—it has been from the U.S. public, not the targets of our intervention. Such language, however threadbare, may also offer 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 U.S. officials routinely point with pride to the increasing “precision” and “accuracy” of 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 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 that 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’ book
The Gamble
) to remember: “You’re the predator.”
The Predator drone is armed with two missiles. The more advanced drone, originally called the Predator B, now being deployed to the skies over Af-Pak, 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 fourteen missiles (or four missiles and two 500-pound bombs), which means it packs quite a deadly wallop. 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 upon the peasants, fundamentalist guerrillas, and terrorists of the Af-Pak border regions.
In Washington, when the Af-Pak war is discussed, it’s in the bloodless, bureaucratic language of “global counterinsurgency” or “irregular warfare,” 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
: Faced with rising numbers of civilian casualties from U.S. and NATO air strikes in Afghanistan and an increasingly outraged Afghan public, American officials tend to place the blame for most skyborne “collateral damage” squarely on the Taliban. As Joint Chiefs Chairman Michael Mullen bluntly explained, “[T]he enemy hides behind civilians.” Hence, so this Empire-speak argument goes, dead civilians are actually the Taliban’s doing.