Obama’s signature

Posted on July 11, 2013 by Derek Gregory

For decades Presidents of the United States have used a machine to sign ‘personal’ letters. According to reports, Obama used the ‘autopen’ to sign an extension to the Patriot Act when he was at a G8 summit in France and out of reach (more examples here).

But others are never out of reach of Obama’s signature. The ‘signature strikes’ carried out by Predators and Reapers also disclose a disconcerting entanglement of the ‘personal’ (these are not robotic: a network of human agents is actively involved and they have access to high-resolution full-motion video feeds) with the machinic (not least because the President doesn’t personally ‘sign off’ on them). I’ve discussed them in detail here, and the Brave New Foundation has released an important video about them and the Dhatta Khel incident in March 2011 in particular.

Film-maker Robert Greenwald provides background to the video here and Arianna Huffington returns to it today. Referring to Obama’s speech on 23 May 2013 – see my discussion here – she writes:

“Before any strike is taken,” he declared, “there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured — the highest standard we can set.”

Though signature strikes were not mentioned, some assumed language like “near certainty” and “highest standard” meant they were no longer going to be used. That assumption was proven wrong as just days later an administration official told the New York Times that signature strikes will continue in Pakistan, a statement the Times’ Andrew Rosenthal wrote“seem[ed] to contradict the entire tenor of Mr. Obama’s speech.”

Two weeks later, on June 9, a drone struck a vehicle in Yemen, killing not only several supposed militants, but also a boy named Abdulaziz. He was 10 years old. “Near certainty” and those new “clear guidelines” apparently weren’t enough for Abdulaziz. The administration refused to comment on the boy’s death, or the strike itself. So much for accountability and transparency. And just last week, a strike in Waziristan killed 16 people and wounded five others.

I’m left thinking of those famous lines from Edward Fiztgerald‘s translation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam:

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

Spaces of constructed (in)visibility

Posted on May 21, 2013 by Derek Gregory

Further to my previous posts on air strikes in Pakistan here and here, the International Crisis Group today published a new report, Drones: Myths and Reality in Pakistan.

From ICG’s media release:

‘The report’s major findings and recommendations are:

Pakistan’s new civilian leadership under PML-N leader Nawaz Sharif must make the extension of the state’s writ in FATA the centrepiece of its counter-terrorism agenda, bringing violent extremists to justice and thus diminishing Washington’s perceived need to conduct drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal belt.

Drones are not a long-term solution to the problem they are being deployed to address, since the jihadi groups in FATA will continue to recruit as long as the region remains an ungoverned no-man’s land.

The U.S., while pressuring the Pakistan military to end all support to violent extremists, should also support civilian efforts to bring FATA into the constitutional and legal mainstream.

The lack of candour from the U.S. and Pakistan governments on the drone program undermines efforts to assess its legality or its full impact on FATA’s population. The U.S. refuses to officially acknowledge the program; Pakistan portrays it as a violation of national sovereignty, but ample evidence exists of tacit Pakistani consent and, at times, active cooperation.

Pakistan must ensure that its actions and those of the U.S. comply with the principles of distinction and proportionality under international humanitarian law. Independent observers should have access to targeted areas, where significant military and militant-imposed barriers have made accurate assessments of the program’s impact, including collateral damage, nearly impossible.

The U.S. should cease any practices, such as “signature strikes”, that do not comply with international humanitarian law. The U.S. should develop a legal framework that defines clear roles for the executive, legislative and judicial branches, converting the drone program from a covert CIA operation to a military-run program with a meaningful level of judicial and Congressional oversight.

“The core of any Pakistani counter-terrorism strategy in this area should be to incorporate FATA into the country’s legal and constitutional mainstream”, says Samina Ahmed, Crisis Group’s Senior Asia Adviser. “For Pakistan, the solution lies in overhauling an anachronistic governance system so as to establish fundamental constitutional rights and genuine political enfranchisement in FATA, along with a state apparatus capable of upholding the rule of law and bringing violent extremists to justice”.

The report speaks directly to claims that the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) are treated by both Washington and Islamabad as a space of exception, subject to special legal dispensations that expose their inhabitants to military violence and, ultimately, death. And it also repeats much of the argument I made earlier about the close collaboration between Washington and Islamabad based, in part, on the Wikileaks cables.

But there’s nothing about the air strikes carried out in the FATA by the Pakistan Air Force. Since the report is specifically about the CIA-directed counter-terrorism campaign, you may think the silence unsurprising. But I think it’s important not to contract the focus in this way – I say that not to exempt the US from criticism (far from it) but as a reminder that this is a space of constructed visibility that is also (as always) a space of constructed invisibility. The inhabitants of FATA deserve to have the wider landscape of military violence exposed to the public gaze.

As part of that process, this passage is immensely important, given the difficulty of reporting from or carrying out field work in the FATA:

‘Islamabad has a constitutional and international obligation to protect the lives of citizens and non-citizens alike on its territory. Even if it seeks U.S. assistance against individuals and groups at war with the state, Pakistan is still obliged to ensure that its actions and those of the U.S. comply with the principles, among others, of distinction and proportionality under International Humanitarian Law, and ideally to give independent observers unhindered access to the areas targeted.’

The ICG’s very first recommendation, therefore, is to lift ‘all travel and other restrictions on independent observers, national and foreign, to the targeted areas in FATA.’ In short, it’s not enough to demand that Washington be transparent in the procedures it follows (whatever Obama might say in his advertised speech on Thursday); it’s also vital for observers to be able to witness and report what is happening on the ground in Waziristan (and elsewhere). Here is Madiha Tahir:

‘I do think these stories would look quite different if they were being told by people from the countries in question. It would shift perspective, and it would highlight as well as marginalize different aspects of the issue. As it is, the conversation is had among largely American, largely white, largely male voices, and the only real options for the rest of us are either to enter that conversation by agreeing or disagreeing, or risk irrelevance.

… [T]he intense focus on the government’s narrative lets journalists and the media off-the-hook for not doing the hard work of actually reporting the stories of those on the receiving end of America’s war in Pakistan.’

Homing in

Posted on April 29, 2013 by Derek Gregory

I’m finally home from Europe – a strange sentence, I think, since I always feel so much at home when I return to Europe. I spent the last week in the Czech Republic, where I was a guest of the Department of Human Geography and Regional Development in Ostrava: I’m deeply grateful (once again) to all the faculty and graduate students, and most of all to Tomáš Drobík, Přemysl Mácha, Tadeusez Siwek and Monika Šumberová, for their warm hospitality and lively discussions.

While I was there I gave a version of “Drones, spaces of exception and the everywhere war” (abstract below) and, as always, learned much from the questions and a subsequent workshop with graduate students. A version of this will eventually appear in a new collection edited by Lisa Parks, Life in the age of drones, and parts of it will be re-worked for my own book.

There have been many compelling visualizations of drone strikes in Pakistan – most recently, Out of Sight, Out of Mind, whose artful rendering of the database compiled by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism went viral in March 2013. But the infographic is confined to a temporal plot: it is, in a significant sense, also out of site, and a primary purpose of this essay is to show that the geography of these strikes is not incidental to their politics.

In fact, multiple geographies are inscribed in them

First, it is necessary to insert US-directed strikes into the matrix of state violence in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. This means showing how Pakistan’s Frontier Crimes Regulations (even in their amended form) work in concert with the Actions (in Aid of Civil Power) Regulations (2011) to constitute the FATA as an exceptional space in something like the sense specified by Giorgio Agamben: a zone whose inhabitants are exposed to military and paramilitary violence and ultimately death through the law. This licenses air strikes by the Pakistan Air Force as part of continuing military offensives against militants and insurgents: in short, the people of the FATA are not only “Living Under Drones.

This receives remarkably little attention in most critical discussions, which fasten on the ways in which the people of the FATA are also exposed to state violence through a second, transnational legal geography – the US assertion of its (contested) right to carry its war in Afghanistan across the border into Pakistan. This will be dissected in depth; but these are, of course, more than legal formations. Most US air strikes are confined to the FATA but PAF strikes are not, and the reasons for this doubled geography will be described and the incidence of both US and PAF strikes mapped in as much detail as the data allow.

A second step is then to document the tactical co-operation between the US and Pakistan militaries in orchestrating the drone strikes (and, on occasion, co-ordinating them with Pakistan ground offensives). We now know that this co-operation started with the very first US-directed strike in the FATA: Mark Mazzetti has shown that the targeted killing of Nek Muhammad in June 2004 was undertaken as a favour to the Pakistan government, which regarded him as an enemy of the state, to gain access to Pakistan’s airspace so that the US could hunt down its own cross-border enemies. We also know from the US diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks, and from a series of reports by investigative journalists, that this deadly alliance has continued – despite repeated denials and protests by Islamabad. This analysis extends the network in which US remote operations are usually inserted – launch sites in Afghanistan and Pakistan, CENTCOM’s Combined Air and Space Operations Center in Qatar, and video analysts, pilots, lawyers and commanders at multiple sites inside the continental United States – beyond purely US assemblages.

But a third step is to show how the drone strikes in the FATA spiral out into an even wider matrix of military and paramilitary violence – the ‘everywhere war’ prosecuted in Yemen, Somalia, Mali, and elsewhere – whose contours map a profound transformation in the very nature and meaning of war itself.

Regular readers will recognise that this draws on a series of posts where I sketched out parts of the argument.

The discussions that followed my presentation in Ostrava were immensely helpful. I began outside Pakistan, exploring in detail the anatomy of a drone strike in Afghanistan, and there was considerable interest in the narrative (some of which you’ll find in “From a view to a kill” under the DOWNLOADS tab; I’ve extended this analysis for my book too) and in the techno-cultural construction of the killing space.

But once I moved to the CIA-directed strikes in Pakistan, and the question of targeted killing, attention focused on trade-offs between the simultaneous contraction of the target space through the provision of high-resolution video feeds and ‘weaponeering’ to reduce the blast radius – these strikes are a far cry from bombing missions during the Second World War or the B-52 offensives over Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia – and the lowering of the threshold for military and paramilitary violence: the argument that damage and death can be contained all too readily becomes (to its protagonists) an argument for sending in the drones. This in turn spiralled into a debate about transparency – about the limits to knowledge in democratic societies – and about the artful direction of debate to Washington (‘what rules are being followed?’) and away from the scene of violence in Waziristan.

Finally, we talked about the dissonance between this ‘optical war’ and the more haptic-sensuous war experienced on the ground (by both armed actors and civilians) – which I hope in some way helped prepare for their next visitor, anthropologist Tim Ingold.

The tragedies of other places

Posted on April 18, 2013 by Derek Gregory

Rafia Zakaria, a columnist for Dawn, Pakistan’s largest-circulation English-language newspaper, reflects at Guernica on the disjuncture between the global attention paid to the victims of violence in her own country and those in the United States:

Attacks in America are far more indelible in the world’s memory than attacks in any other country. There may be fewer victims and less blood, but American tragedies somehow seem to occur in a more poignant version of reality, in a way that evokes a more sympathetic response. Within minutes American victims are lifted from the nameless to the remembered; their individual tragedies and the ugly unfairness of their ends are presented in a way that cannot but cause the watching world to cry, to consider them intimates, and to stand in their bloody shoes. Death is always unexpected in America and death by a terrorist attack more so than in any other place.

It is this greater poignancy of attacks in America that begs the question of whether the world’s allocations of sympathy are determined not by the magnitude of a tragedy—the numbers dead and injured—but by the contrast between a society’s normal and the cruel aftermath of a terrorist event. It is in America that the difference between the two is the greatest; the American normal is one of a near-perfect security that is unimaginable in many places, especially in countries at war.

I’m not so sure the differential apprehension can be explained quite so cleanly – that ‘American normal’ is shot through with violence and insecurity for millions of people too, and on the same day that Rafia published her essay the Guardian reproduced this map of terrorist incidents in the United States 1970-2011; the animated version is here.

The data on which the map is based raise all sorts of questions, of course, but still the numbers surprised me. America is even more violent than I had imagined.

And yet Rafia does have a point; the scale of political violence in Pakistan is surely far greater than this, and yet its victims received far less sympathetic attention from audiences outside the country than many of those elsewhere in the world. This habituation to the violence done to others (Others?) intersects with Susan Sontag‘s reflections on the suffering of others, and it’s that multi-stranded process of othering that deserves critical reflection. But I think Rafia is on to something important when she suggests that this is about places as well as peoples – about the ways in which habituation and habitus are bound in to apprehensions of different places. Place is one of the crucial ways in which we navigate the world, physically and imaginatively, through the spatial cues provided by the meanings that become attached to place (what does ‘Baghdad’ signify to you?) and the places that become attached to meaning (which places are made to stand for ‘violence’?). I realise I’m using shorthand, but it is the differential play between these meanings-in-place that surely has a significant role in our (dis)regard for the pain of others.

Retrograde logistics

Posted on April 1, 2013 by Derek Gregory

In recent years much attention has been focused on the logistics of supplying the war in Afghanistan. But now the reverse operation is gearing up, and (as anticipated) it’s no more straightforward. Here’s Nate Rawlings for TIME:

For many good reasons, Afghanistan has been called a logistician’s nightmare. It is landlocked and far from a working port. Much of the country – especially in the east where a great deal of the fighting has taken place – is covered with mountains and threaded by decades-old roads and questionable bridges. The easiest way in and out of the country is a geopolitical minefield and the other two routes are three times as expensive.

And yet, for twelve years, logisticians have supplied troops with the equipment — large and small — necessary to fight a war. They have airdropped pallets of food and repair parts on remote bases, tossed “Speedballs” — body bags filled with ammunition and water — out of helicopters to troops under fire. And along the way, extra equipment has piled up at bases around Afghanistan. According to a December 2012 report to Congress by the by the Government Accountability Office, there is the equivalent of more than 90,000 twenty-foot containers of equipment all over Afghanistan. All together, there is $36 billion worth of vehicles, weapons systems, repair parts and utter junk scattered throughout the country, and bringing it home will cost an estimated $5.7 billion.

(You can access a gallery of Yuri Kozyrev‘s photographs, all taken in late January this year, that accompany the essay here; some details of the corresponding British operation, including video, are available here).

Now AFP has confirmed that the current estimated cost of withdrawing US hardware and vehicles from Afghanistan – called a “retrograde” (sic) – will be $5–6 billion from 2012 through to 2014. According to Brigadier General Steven Shapiro of 1st Theater Sustainment Command, a veteran of the withdrawal from Iraq, ‘the retrograde from Afghanistan is one of the most challenging military transportation operations in history in terms of scale and complexity.’ It’s certainly more difficult than Iraq, when equipment was simply trucked across the border to Kuwait ‘where it was packed, cleaned, recorded and shipped on’ within a stable security envelope. Brigadier General Lee K. Levy explains: ‘If you think Iraq was difficult, I would call that getting your bachelor’s degree in logistics. Withdrawing from Afghanistan is getting your PhD in logistics and we are writing our thesis as we speak.’

In Afghanistan the most sensitive equipment will again be sent to Kuwait, though this time the US will be forced to use giant C-17 transport planes. Some of the remaining gear will be sold (but the opportunities in Afghanistan are likely to be less than they were in Iraq, when some $1 billion of equipment were sold off or simply given to the Iraqi military) or even destroyed. The process requires a labour-intensive inventory, selection and strip-down – you can get an idea of what’s involved in this short video from Bagram – and even then a vast amount will remain to be shipped out.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the operation began in earnest last month, when a trial convoy of 20 military vehicles and more than 70 containers of military hardware was trucked through Pakistan and shipped out from Karachi. According to the Journal,

The military says it now plans to move a combined total of around 100 containers and vehicles per week through Pakistan, a figure that is going to increase gradually over the coming weeks.

When the exodus is in full swing — military commanders expect the logistics push to reach its peak this August — the U.S. will be sending about 1,500 military vehicles and 1,000 containers per month out of Afghanistan. The majority — around two-thirds of that cargo — will move through Pakistan, military officials say.

Shapiro was bullish about the operation – the US Army has made no secret that what it calls the Pakistan Ground Lines of Communication are critical to the success of the retrograde – and he claimed to be ‘very confident that the Pakistani military is going to help us move through Pakistan.’ But it remains to be seen whether the outbound supply chain will be any more secure than the inbound one was: today five NATO trucks en route for Karachi were torched and more or less completely destroyed 120 km. south east of Quetta.

Dronesong

Posted on March 30, 2013 by Derek Gregory

‘In 1990,’ Palestinian pop-artist Laila Shawa recalls, ‘I had breast cancer.’

While undergoing radiotherapy, I watched on television the precision bombing of Baghdad by US airplanes, forever linking the two events in my mind and in my art. The body woman and the body land amalgamate; the invasion of one is equated with the invasion of the other and the implicit fact that both leave scars.”

Jo Long made a parallel, beautifully nuanced argument in her ‘Border Anxiety’ essay in Antipode in 2006, but you can literally see what Laila Shaw means in the extraordinary Cast Lead (2011; above left).

Laila is probably still best known for her silkscreen cycle Walls of Gaza (1992-95) – a different take on graffiti to most geographers’, since she insists that the situation was unique:

I believe the Gaza Graffiti differs completely from urban graffiti that one sees in big cities around the world. In Gaza, graffiti on the wall was the only method available to Palestinians to communicate with each other. The Israeli occupiers banned any form of media in Gaza, such as newspapers, radio, or television. The writing is cursive, spontaneous and hurried. It changed almost daily to update whatever was happening in Gaza.

In the Walls cycle she juxtaposed images of Palestinian children and graffiti from Gaza to expose the trauma of war and occupation, a theme to which she returned in Target (2009), a variation on an iconic panel from Walls, in which a photograph of a young child is superimposed against a graffiti-covered wall with a cross-hair centred on his face. ‘War deprives children of their childhood,’ she says.

Much of her work depends on mixed media juxtapositions like this, which she mobilizes to brilliant effect. She explains:

‘Today, when we are desensitized by the surfeit of media violence, new strategies are needed to overcome people’s apathy and weariness for compassion.’

Last year she had an exhibition at London’s October Gallery, The Other Side of Paradise, which was in part provoked by a documentary on a female suicide bomber but which also included the extraordinary images shown below, Birds of Paradise and Gaza Sky, which speak directly to my previous post about other ways of visualizing drones.

Laila was born in Gaza, but Gaza Sky strikes me as problematic; Israel doesn’t use Predators, so far as I know, but manufactures its own Heron drones and leases/sells them to other states. Still, the image captures occupied Palestine since – for me – the reference isn’t only to Roy Lichtenstein‘s Whaam but also to Mahmoud Darwish‘s moving poem The earth is closing on us (which Edward Said used for his collaboration with Jean Mohr, After the last sky):

Where should we go after the last border? Where should the birds fly after the last sky?

I’m left wondering about how to draw together my first and last paragraphs – how to bring these ‘birds’ and the bodies on which they feed into the same frame. This isn’t a compositional problem for my writing; it’s a political-aesthetic one. So I start to think about Laila’s Target again. For The social life of bombs, I plan to end the performance-work with a back-projected image of three children asleep under a checkered counterpane; all you you can hear is the rhythmic sound of their breathing. As the camera moves in, it becomes clear that each checkered square is in motion; the sound gets louder. Closer still, and each square becomes a video feed from a drone. Closer still, and one square fills the whole screen: the compound in which the children are sleeping, seen from high above (and far away). By now the sound of breathing is incredibly loud; suddenly, an even louder explosion. When the smoke clears, the sound dies away, and the lights slowly come up, we see three small figures, clutching the remains of their bedding – a re-staging and reworking of Noor Behram‘s to me iconic photograph of the three Bismullah children, the sole survivors of a drone strike in Waziristan. But it could, of course, be Gaza. Or Yemen. Or Somalia…

Watching the drones

Posted on March 26, 2013 by Derek Gregory

An interesting interview over at the Huffington Post with Wesley Grubbs, one of the visual designers at Berkeley-based Pitch Interactive responsible for the infographic of drone strikes in Pakistan that was released on Monday and has since gone viral. I drew attention to it in my discussion of the geography of those strikes, but that dimension doesn’t appear in this otherwise compelling infographic (screenshot below). The project is called Out of Sight, Out of Mind – which certainly speaks to the politics of drone warfare – but it’s also out of site, and the geography of these strikes, as I tried to show, is not incidental to those politics.

I think that the political-aesthetic effect of this visualization – which is considerable, otherwise why so much attention? The numbers aren’t new to anyone who’s followed the Bureau of Investigative Journalism‘s painstaking work – is bound up less with the raw numbers and more with those silver-grey arcs of light falling to the ground line: it’s a much more sobering (and I dare say thrilling) effect than a lifeless (sic) table. As I watch them descend, I’m drawn back to images of much earlier bombings, and the lights exploding against a velvet sky. And a visualization is doubly appropriate to a weapon that depends so much on visual apprehension – full-motion video feeds – and yet whose operation in the borderlands is shrouded in such semi-secrecy. Grubbs told the Bureau that their intention was ‘to cause people to pause for a moment and say “Wow I’ve never seen this in that light before”.’

The site is live – it will be updated in real time – and the same design group is intent on developing similar visualizations for drone strikes in Yemen and Somalia.

The Bureau’s work, the primary basis for the interactive, is so careful and considered that this attempt to downplay and even dismiss Pitch Interactive’s project is either simply ignorant or just plain silly. The author objects that the numbers ‘aren’t exact’ and wants to see the full spreadsheet – but the Bureau has made its detailed databases available and discussed their limitations in depth and detail: what better (‘exact’) sources does she have in mind? Perhaps she should try here.

I’m not sure that this is much better. Its author concludes: ‘Put simply, the visualization is implying that of 3,105 drone-strike casualties, only 47 are known to be legitimate kills. This is nonsense.’ Actually, what is nonsense is to misread and mis-represent the infographic in this way; what the website clearly says is that less than 2 per cent of the victims (a total of 47 people) have been ‘high profile targets’ (the original object of Sylvan Magnolia, the code-name for the covert war).

Not incidentally, less than twenty per cent of those killed in the strikes have been named, and the Bureau has just released a short video to crowd-source funding so that their raw numbers are finally turned into names:

You can donate here.

Dirty dancing and spaces of exception in Pakistan

Posted on March 24, 2013 by Derek Gregory

Following up my post on the air campaigns waged by the United States and by Pakistan inside the Federally Administered Tribal Territories and the North-West Frontier Province (now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa), here are some screenshots from Chris Herwig‘s remarkable cartographic animation of casualties from US drone strikes from 2004 through to the present (data from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism):

Casualties from US drone strikes to end December 2007

Casualties from US drone strikes to end December 2008

Casualties from US drone strikes to end December 2009

Casualties from US drone strikes to end December 2010

Casualties from US drone strikes to end December 2011

Casualties from US drone strikes to end December 2012

You can see the rapid escalation of strikes in 2009-2010 and their contraction in 2011-2012. There is also a tendency for later strikes to cause fewer casualties; the Bureau suggests that this may have been the result of a deliberate decision to limit civilian casualties (the CIA was already reported to be using new, smaller missiles with a restricted blast field and minimal shrapnel by the spring of 2010, so the later change is likely to be down to a mix of better intelligence and greater circumspection) and, more recently, of a switch away from ‘signature strikes’ – the two are of course related – and John Brennan, who was one of the main boosters of the programme’s expansion, now claims that drone strikes are a weapon ‘of last resort’. Maybe; most sources agree that even as the numbers of deaths dwindled, so too did their tactical significance. By February 2011 it was clear that fewer and fewer were so-called ‘high-value targets’ and more and more were simply foot-soldiers.

Here are the Bureau’s raw figures:

You can find an interactive animation of the Bureau’s tabulations from Pitch Interactive here (thanks to Steve Legg for the tip); the screenshot below doesn’t do justice to the political-aesthetic effect of seeing this in full motion (or of clicking on each strike for the details):

The maps also show that the strikes have been concentrated on North Waziristan, increasingly so since 2010, the locus of the Haqqani Network (which is a longstanding ally of Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence), with a secondary concentration on South Waziristan (a key locus of Tehrik-i-Taliban). Here’s a tabulation from the Long War Journal, and although the strike numbers are marginally different from the Bureau’s the geographical concentration is clear:

What the maps can’t convey is the intricate, inconstant gavotte between Pakistan’s various military campaigns and US air strikes in the borderlands since 2004. In the wake of 9/11 and the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, and in response to increasing pressure from Washington, the Pakistan Army launched a number of offensives against militants in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). In April 2004, after fierce fighting in the mountains of South Waziristan, Islamabad concluded a peace accord with Nek Muhammad, a key militant leader in the agency. But he was killed just two months later, the first casualty of a US drone strike in Pakistan, and the agreement immediately collapsed. In 2005 similar, fragile agreements were negotiated with Baitullah Mehsud, Nek’s successor, and other militant leaders, but these were soon broken. Accords were also signed in North Waziristan in 2006 and 2007 but these too were short-lived. In 2008 a peace accord was signed with the Tehrik-i-Taliban but heavy fighting continued, with major ground and air operations in the agencies to the north of the Khyber Pass. In 2009 Pakistan’s military campaign became even more aggressive. Much of its effort was focused on the northern districts, especially around the Swat Valley, but attention then switched back to South Waziristan. During the summer the Pakistan Air Force carried out regular air strikes in the region; in August 2009 Baitullah Mehsud was killed in a US drone strike. In October 30,000 ground troops entered the region, and US drone strikes in South Waziristan immediately juddered to a (temporary) halt. These operations drove large numbers of militants into Orakzai, which in recent years has been a major target of air strikes by the Pakistan Air Force.

The previous paragraph is little more than a caricature of a highly complex and evolving battlespace, but the gavotte I’ve described has been artfully – if intermittently – choreographed by the US and by Pakistan in fraught concert: so much so that Joshua Foust writes of the ‘Islamabad drone dance’.

This may surprise some readers; earlier this month Ben Emmerson QC, the UN Special Rapporteur on Counterterrorism and Human Rights, concluded a three-day visit to Pakistan by reaffirming what he described as ‘the position of the government of Pakistan’ that drone strikes in the FATA ‘are a violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.’ Emmerson met with officials from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Defence and the Secretariat of the FATA – but not, significantly, with anyone from the military or the ISI – who told him that ‘reports of continuing tacit consent by Pakistan to the use of drones on its territory by any other State are false’ and that ‘a thorough search of Government records had revealed no indication of such consent having been given.’ Certainly, the government has repeatedly protested the strikes in public, and the National Assembly passed resolutions in May 2011 and April 2012 condemning them. But Foust insists that Emmerson has been an unwitting participant in the dance.

We know, from the Wikileaks cache of diplomatic cables from the US Embassy in Islamabad, that in August 2008 Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani told the Ambassador that he approved of the drone strikes as part of ongoing offensives in the FATA – ‘I don’t care if they do it as long as they get the right people’ – and that ‘We’ll protest it in the National Assembly and then ignore it.’ But this was more than ‘tacit consent’. Foust reminds us that, until comparatively recently, US drones were being launched or supported from at least six different air bases inside Pakistan, shown below, including Islamabad, Jacobabad, Peshawar, Quetta and Tarbela Ghazi; the US was ordered to leave Shamsi and had its lease terminated in December 2011.

But there’s more. Pakistan had agreed that the focus of the US strikes would be North and South Waziristan. Earlier that same year, March 2008, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mullen asked General Kayani, Pakistan’s Chief of Army Staff, for help in approving ‘a third Restricted Operating Zone for US aircraft over the FATA’, and writing in the Washington Post in November 2010 Greg Miller confirmed that these ‘flight boxes’ were confined to North and South Waziristan (although the US had unsuccessfully pressed for permission to extend the flights over Quetta, outside the FATA). The geometry of those boxes is not known, though it would not be difficult to superimpose two likely rectangles over the previous map sequence. Operational details are, not surprisingly, far from clear. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal on 26 September 2012, the CIA sends a fax to the ISI every month detailing strike zones and intended targets – replies apparently stopped early last year, but the US interprets the silence as ‘tacit consent’ since Pakistan immediately de-conflicts the air space to allow the Predators to carry out their surveillance – and a report in the New York Times earlier this month claimed that the US still provides the Pakistan military with 30 minutes notice of an imminent strike in South Waziristan (but no advance notice for strikes in North Waziristan because the Haqqani Network enjoys such close ties with the ISI that the CIA fears their targets would be warned of the attack).

The focus on the FATA follows not only from the militant groups that are based there; it also derives from the exceptional legal status of the borderlands. Under British colonial rule, this was a buffer zone whose inhabitants were allowed a measure of nominal autonomy; colonial power was exercised indirectly through the authority vested in tribal leaders (who received subsidies from the British), and the special Frontier Crimes Regulations – in practice corrupt and draconian – were codified by Lord Curzon in 1901. After partition and independence in 1947 Pakistan retained the 1901 Regulations, so that the President – who has direct executive control of the FATA – appoints a Political Agent for each agency who has absolute authority to adjudicate criminal and civil affairs; ordinary Acts of Parliament do not apply to the FATA unless the President expressly declares that they do. Limited reforms were introduced in August 2011, including the right to political mobilisation, but some commentators raised doubts about their implementation. Preventive detention and collective punishment remain in force and the writ of the courts is still severely restricted.

These special measures were reinforced by the simultaneous passage of the Actions (in Aid of Civil Power) Regulations in 2011, a quid pro quo demanded by the military, which allowed the Pakistan Armed Forces to carry out ‘law enforcement duties [and] to conduct law enforcement operations’, granted them sweeping powers of pre-emptive arrest and detention without charge, and forbade the high court from intervening. According to one local politician, these new Regulations are ‘even more dangerous’ than the Frontier Crimes Regulations: ‘It is a system of martial law over the Tribal Areas.’ A new report from Amnesty International (from which I’ve taken these accounts) borrows its title, The Hands of Cruelty, from a despairing claim made by a lawyer from Peshawar: ‘The hands of cruelty extend to the Tribal Areas, but the hands of justice cannot reach that far.’

(Given the – I think abusive – attack on Amnesty’s report by Abdullah Mansoor at Global Research as ‘malicious’ and ‘misinformation’ that virtually ignores the violence perpetrated by the Taliban and other militant groups, I should also draw readers’ (and his) attention to Amnesty’s previous report, As if Hell fell on me, which provides a detailed indictment of exactly that).

In short, the FATA constitute a space of exception in precisely the sense given to that term by Giorgio Agamben: the normal rights and protections under the law are withdrawn from a section of the population by the law. To see what this has to do with the geography of US drone strikes we can turn to an attack on 19 November 2008 on a residential compound in Indi Khel, 22 miles outside Bannu and about two hours by road from Peshawar. Five alleged militants were killed and four civilians injured: not a large toll compared to other strikes, and yet the public reaction across Pakistan was extraordinary.

A diplomatic cable from US Ambassador Anne Patterson on 24 November explained the widening gap between what she called ‘private GOP [Government of Pakistan] acquiescence and public condemnation for U.S. action’:

‘According to local press, the alleged U.S. strike in Bannu on November 19 marked the first such attack in the settled areas of the Northwest Frontier Province, outside of the tribal areas. The strike drew a new round of condemnation by Prime Minister Gilani, coalition political parties, opposition leaders, and the media.

‘According to Pakistani press, the strike killed four people, including a senior Al-Qaida member, and injured five others. The first strike within “Pakistan proper” is seen as a watershed event, and the media is suggesting this could herald the spread of attacks to Peshawar or Islamabad. Even politicians who have no love lost for a dead terrorist are concerned by strikes within what is considered mainland Pakistan.’

The language is truly extraordinary, with its distinction between the FATA and ‘Pakistan proper’, even ‘mainland Pakistan’. In short: (imaginative) geography matters. Not for nothing are the FATA known in Urdu as ilaqa ghair, which means ‘alien’ or ‘foreign’ lands.

The plight of the people in the FATA is exacerbated by the forceful imposition of a second, transnational legal regime: the right asserted by the United States to carry its fight against al Qaeda and its war against the Taliban across the border from the ‘hot’ zone in Afghanistan into militant sanctuaries in Pakistan. This is part of a larger argument about the advanced deconstruction of the traditional, bounded battlefield – here Frédéric Megret‘s work is indispensable – and the production of a global battlespace, processes that have been accelerated by the remote operations permitted by drones. But it remains both an assertion and an argument. Although international law is not a deus ex machina, a neutral court of appeal above the fray, it nonetheless has a developed body of precepts that are supposed to regulate armed conflicts between states, and there are also protocols and tribunals that govern armed conflicts between governments and non-state actors within the territorial boundaries of a state (the former Yugoslavia or Ruanda, for example). But conflicts between states and transnational non-state actors pose new and difficult questions, and perhaps even map a ‘legal void’. Significantly, as Eyal Benvenisti points out in the Duke Journal of International and Comparative Law,

‘Concurrently with the successful efforts to impose restraints on intra-state asymmetric warfare, we have been witnessing efforts by the same powerful countries that pressed for intra-state conflict regulation to deregulate inter-state asymmetric warfare or what may be called “transnational” warfare.‘

I will leave a review of these debates, at once legal and political, for another day; among the most relevant recent contributions are Kenneth Anderson, ‘Targeted killing and drone warfare: how we came to debate whether there is a legal geography of war’ (2011), available here; Laurie Blank, ‘Defining the battlefield in contemporary conflict and counterterrorism: understanding the parameters of the zone of combat’, Georgia Journal of International and Comparative Law 39 (1) (2010-11), available here; Jennifer Daskal, ‘The geography of the battlefield: a framework for detention and targeting outside the “hot” conflict zone’ (2012), available here; Noam Lubell and Nathan Derejko, ‘A global battlefield? Drones and the geographical scope of armed conflict’, Journal of International Criminal Justice 11 (1) (2013) 65-88 (abstract here). In this twilight zone, where Washington at once admits its actions through a never-ending string of off-the-record briefings and yet denies any responsibility for their collateral outcomes, there are no inquiries into ‘mistakes’, no culpability for wrong-doing, and no compensation or restitution for the innocent victims.

Whatever you make of the rights and wrongs of all this, what matters for my present purposes is that these two legal regimes, one national and the other transnational, work in concert to expose the people of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas to military and paramilitary violence and, ultimately, death.

It’s more than a matter of law, of course (and in any case we shouldn’t confuse legality with legitimacy). Within these exceptional spaces there has been active, tactical collaboration between the US and Pakistan. Another diplomatic cable reported a meeting on 22 January 2008 with General Kayani, who asked US Central Command to provide ‘continuous Predator coverage of the conflict area’ in South Waziristan, but was offered only Joint Terminal Attack Controllers to direct PAF air strikes by F-16s – an offer which was refused because of a reluctance to allow US ground forces to operate inside Pakistan. But in September and October 2009 small teams of US Special Forces were deployed to provide intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) support to the Pakistan Army, which included a ‘live downlink of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) full motion video.’ (What is interesting about all these exchanges is the degree of collaboration they reveal not only between the US and Pakistan but also between the CIA and the US military, especially Joint Special Operations Command; this is not surprising, given the hybridisation of military and paramilitary violence and the close involvement of the military in supplying, servicing and even flying the drones used in CIA-directed strikes).

There have been several reports of continuing collaboration between American and Pakistani intelligence operatives working on the ground in Pakistan, and one source – who purported to run a network of agents and ‘spotters’ in North and South Waziristan – told Reuters in January 2012 that ‘Our working relationship is a bit different from our political relationship. It’s more productive.’ He claimed that the US and Pakistan agreed priority target lists between them, and that it took little more than two or three hours between the location of a targeted individual and the firing of missiles. These claims are impossible to verify, but the emphasis on a working relationship rings true.

Perhaps the most chilling of the Wikileaks cables is this (redacted) message sent from Islamabad in February 2009, reporting a discussion with a senior member of the FATA Secretariat, who enthusiastically recommended the practice of ‘double tap‘ – follow-up strikes targeting rescuers – and endorses the rationale for signature strikes against unknown, un-named targets:

9. (S) XXXXXXXXXXXX remains a strong advocate of U.S. strikes. In fact, he suggested to PO that the U.S. consider follow-on attacks immediately after an initial strike. He explained that after a strike, the terrorists seal off the area to collect the bodies; in the first 10-24 hours after an attack, the only people in the area are terrorists, so “you should hit them again-there are no innocents there at that time.” His sources report that the reported September 29 strike in South Waziristan had been particularly successful; “you will see that you hit more than has been reported in the press both in terms of quantity and quality.” XXXXXXXXXXXX also drew a diagram essentially laying out the rationale for signature strikes…

Here you can see two perspectives on administrative killing, one from Pakistan and the other from the United States, converging onto a single target.

The cables from which I’ve quoted are all four or five years old, but this reflects the shutters coming down after the subsequent assault on Wikileaks and the arrest of Bradley Manning – the reports from seasoned investigative journalists are much more recent. I suppose you might conclude that none of them contradicts that artful word that does so much silent work in the official statement repeated by Emmerson, in which Pakistan denies reports of continuing tacit consent. But given what I’ve shown about the deadly dance over those five years, do you really think the music has stopped?

Air strikes in Pakistan’s borderlands

Posted on March 19, 2013 by Derek Gregory

I’m speaking about Drone strikes and the matrix of violence in Pakistan at a conference in Vancouver at the week-end – a presentation which will form part of The everywhere war – and to set some of the parameters I’ve been revisiting the changing geography of air strikes in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. It’s a formidably difficult question given the extraordinary dangers facing journalists, Pakistani or foreign, seeking to report from the FATA: for an incisive discussion of the media landscape inside the FATA see Sadaf Baig‘s Reporting from the frontlines.

In my view, the most thorough if necessarily imperfect tabulations of US-directed strikes are those provided by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. There have been several attempts to map this database, including the Bureau’s own use of Google maps (see below and here; but be careful: zooming in is a product of the digital platform and will give a misleading sense of the resolution level of the data).

One of the most thoughtful (and dynamic) representations comes from Chris Herwig. He described the technical basis of his mapping over at MapBox here, and you can visit his microsite here. Go here to see the animation running (with annotations).

Chris’s project has also been featured on PBS here, where he also responds to several criticisms of the data and his visualizations.

Over at Slate, Chris Kirk has produced an interactive that tries to show the maximum number of estimated casualties from each strike, but the data are drawn from the New America Foundation database which has been criticised for underestimating casualties; one (to October 2012) version is here, and another (to February 2013), using a different cartographic design, is here. More generally, Forensic Architecture‘s Unmanned Aerial Violence team is working to produce an online visualization of drone strikes not only over Pakistan but also over Afghanistan,Yemen, Somalia and Palestine. but it’s not yet operational).

But the problem doesn’t end with the cartographic piercing of the veil of semi-secrecy the White House, the CIA and JSOC cast over their remote operations, though I’ve noted before how their collective teasing of American journalists over the legal and administrative protocols they supposedly follow – especially the so-called “disposition matrix” – works to (mis)direct attention towards Washington and away from the sites that Chris and others have struggled to map.

I say this because the US is not the only state carrying out air strikes in the region. Soon after 9/11 and the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, largely in response to pressure from Washington, the Pakistan military moved into the FATA. According to Zahid Ali Khan, Pakistan’s Frontier Corps was deployed in December 2001, but by May 2002 it was decided that a much heavier hand was needed and the Pakistan Army was ordered into the borderlands for the first time in the nation’s history. Local people requested that military operations be limited to ground forces, but by 2004 this agreement was in shreds and – as the image below shows – ever since the Pakistan Air Force has made no secret of its continuing air strikes on the FATA.

Again, there is no public tabulation, but the American Enterprise Institute‘s Critical Threats daily Pakistan Security Brief – I know, I know, it’s a neoconservative think-tank – culls this (needless to say, approving) record from reports in Pakistan media in the first two months of this year alone:

25 February PAF kills 10 TTP militants in Tirah [Kurram/Khyber, FATA]

21 February PAF bombs militants in Orakzai [NWF Province] killing 29

19-20 February PAF jets bomb TTP hideouts in Orakzai

11 February PAF jets kill 8 militants in the Tirah Valley

8 February Jets kill 9 militants in Orakzai

7 February PAF targets militants in Orakzai

6 February Jets kill 8 in Orakzai

30 January PAF kills 23 militants in Tirah Valley and 8 in Orakzai agency

28 January Pakistani jets bomb militants in Orakzai

4 January Gunships kill 3, injure more in North Waziristan retaliation

It’s a bare bones summary, clearly, and I suspect the readiness of the AEI to trust local media to report PAF strikes is in stark contrast to their attitude to local reports of US drone strikes. I’ve also deliberately retained the original phrasing: conspicuously, there is no record of civilian casualties. Like the United States, Pakistan routinely plays these down or denies them altogether. Here, for example, is a typical report via the Long War Journal on 25 March 2010:

‘Pakistani fighter-bombers struck a series of targets in the Mamuzai region in [Orakzai] today. Sixty-one Taliban fighters were killed, Pakistani intelligence officials told The Associated Press. The military claimed that no civilians were killed in the attacks. The targets included a madrassa, a mosque, and a seminary run by the Tablighi Jamaat. Pakistani officials said that Taliban leaders were meeting at the Tablighi seminary.’

It’s unlikely that civilians were unscathed. For the first four years at least the accuracy of the Air Force’s strikes was compromised by what Irfan Ahmad described as its ‘lack of real time electronic intelligence and inferior technical means for command, control and communications’, by deficiencies in the targeting pods used by the PAF’s ageing F-16 aircraft, and by the use of laser-guided missiles whose precision was reduced by clouds or poor visibility. From 2008 new electro-optical targeting pods and sensors were being retrofitted and new ground and air capabilities for image exploitation put in place. In 2009 the Air Force was also the launch customer for the Anglo-Italian Falco reconnaissance drone (see below), which is now co-produced in Pakistan; five systems were soon in use over the FATA, each comprising four aircraft with one held in reserve, and the Air Force was already anticipating arming them ‘with the most modern and lethal payloads’. More recently, the PAF has upgraded its F-16 fleet with new Block 52 versions and installed advanced avionics. Throughout this period, as the military offensive periodically intensified, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people were displaced from the borderlands.

It’s difficult to provide a detailed accounting of the air strikes, but in a rare admission former Air Chief Marshall Rao Qamar Suleiman claimed that the Pakistan Air Force carried out 5,000 strike sorties and dropped 11,600 bombs on 4,600 targets in the FATA between May 2008 and November 2011. Unlike US air strikes in the region, PAF strikes are rarely ‘stand-alone’ affairs but are co-ordinated with ground forces (which is also the case with most drone strikes in Afghanistan, which operate in close concert with troops and conventional strike aircraft).

My object is recording all this is (I hope obviously) emphatically not to say that it is perfectly acceptable for the US to launch air strikes in the FATA because Pakistan is doing the same. Rather, the co-existence of the two air campaigns explains, in part, how it is possible for each party to accuse the other of carrying out an attack, as reported earlier this month. More importantly, it also emphasises the ever-present horizon of danger within which the inhabitants of the borderlands are forced to live. They are not only Living under drones.

The same point was sharpened by CIVIC – now the Center for Civilians in Conflict – in their (I think vital) report Civilian harm and conflict in North West Pakistan, published in October 2010. That report also details the violence meted out to civilians by militant groups in the region; for a detailed survey of the political geography of the borderlands, see Brian Fishman‘s The Battle for Pakistan: militancy and conflict across the FATA and NWFP, produced for the New America Foundation in 2010; there’s also much to think about in Daanish Mustafa and Katherine Brown, ‘Spaces of performative politics and terror in Pakistan‘, and in the same authors’ ‘The Taliban, Public Space and terror in Pakistan‘.

The existence of the two air campaigns also shows that the FATA are produced as a space of exception not only through Washington’s strenuous juggling with the Authorisation to Use Military Force and with international law (to validate the extension of its ‘global battlefield’) – whether it does so with or without Islamabad’s covert consent remains an open question – but also through Islamabad’s continued determination to treat the borderlands as legally anomalous territories for its own assertion of military violence.

The last is a doubled colonial legacy. Not only is the legal geography that structures the FATA’s relations with the Pakistani state a relict from Britain’s imperial decision to treat them as a space to be ‘excepted from state and society for the purposes of war’, as Ian Shaw and Majed Akhter put it in Antipode recently.

So too is the decision to continue to use the FATA as a laboratory for what the British called ‘air control’. Andrew Roe has provided a series of detailed discussions in the RAF’s invaluable Air Power Review, here and here and here, and brought much of his research together in Waging war in Waziristan (2010).

But for a rapid and sobering sense of how these campaigns were viewed from the air in the 1930s you need to watch this BBC interview with Group Captain Robert Lister, Wings over Waziristan, which includes extraordinary cine footage showing what he calls ‘tribal operations from the air’. Lister was posted to Peshawar in 1935, and soon after he arrived both the Army and the Air Force were ordered to put down ‘a tribal insurrection or rebellion’ in Waziristan. Their preferred method was to destroy villages by setting fire to individual houses, blowing them up, or bombing them from the air ‘to make them say “Right, it’s not worthwhile – come to terms.”‘ Listen as Lister says, in cut-glass tones, ‘It was a fair and just way of dealing with it: they started these troubles and had to be dealt with.’

And if you want to discover a different dimension to ‘unmanning’ aerial vehicles, listen from 08.00-08.40.

UPDATE: I’ve just discovered another film shot over Waziristan in 1937 by Leonard de Ville Chisman, which covers the air and ground war against the Faqir of Ipi described by Lister. It contains a number of strikingly similar shots, though there is of course no commentary: you can access it via Colonial Film: Moving Images of the British Empire here. On that remarkably informative site, Francis Gooding writes:

The official record of NWFP operations during 1936-7 – a thick volume, its size indicating the scale and seriousness of the conflict – contains full details about the manner in which aircraft were employed. The flag marches of November that sparked the revolt were accompanied by aircraft reconnaissance, and the record notes that ‘air reconnaissance requirements were met by one flight of No. 5 (Army Co-operation) Squadron’ (Govt of India, op.cit., 15), and the RAF also provided close cover for troops, and this pattern – reconnaissance with close support against the enemy – was repeated throughout the operations.

Reels 14 and 15 of the Chisman collection record precisely these kinds of encounters and air operations, with footage of bombing raids and the dropping of supplies to forward positions by parachute taken from within flying aircraft. Aircraft were also used to disseminate information and warnings about future punitive action (again, this was a tried and tested method, typical of colonial air policing; see Omissi, 1990, 154-5). On 27 August 1937, for instance, ‘notices were dropped over the Shawal area warning the inhabitants that until the Faqir submitted to Government, any tribe sheltering him would be liable for punishment’ (Govt. of India, op.cit., 179), and reel 15 contains a sequence showing a pilot unfurling a large leaflet, with text in Pashto and Urdu. The following sequences show air-drops of these leaflets over hill country. There are also scenes showing armoured cars and tanks on the move, and a sequence apparently shot during a battle, with a line of artillery opening fire on hill positions.

The Faqir’s uprising was arguably the most serious colonial insurgency of the inter-war imperial period, and the films are remarkable in that they record scenes of action from a poorly remembered but major guerrilla conflict. Beyond this historical importance they have another significance, for they offer scenes of something only very rarely captured on film, despite its regular occurrence throughout the Empire – the recourse to the punitive deployment of heavy weaponry against subject peoples in revolt.

Naming names

Posted on February 6, 2013 by Derek Gregory

In March 2011 members of a Mexican drug cartel tortured and murdered a young student, Juan Francisco Sicilia Ortega, along with six of his friends in the city of Cuernavaca in Morelos. His father, Javier Sicilia (right), poet, professor and journalist, later told Time:

‘When I got to Cuernavaca… I was in a lot of emotional pain. But when I arrived at the crematorium I had to deal with the media. I asked the reporters to have some respect; I told them I’d meet them the next day in the city plaza. When I got there I found they’d put a table [for a press conference] out for me, and I realized this was going to be bigger than I’d anticipated.

‘I had never thought of starting a movement or being a spokesman for anything. I’m a poet, and poets are better known for working with more obscure intuitions. But in those moments I was reminded that the life of the soul can be powerful too. My chief intuition then was that we had to give name and form to this tragedy and somehow put that into action with real citizens as a way to tell the government, “We need something new, especially new institutions to fight our lawlessness and corruption and impunity, not just that of the drug cartels but the state.”‘

Sicilia’s demand (above) started the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity (“Haste la Madre!”), but the call to abjure the aggregations and anonymizations of mass violence – by state and non-state actors – has been taken up in other political arenas too.

It’s in this spirit that I read the Open Society‘s detailed listing of 136 people who were subjected to secret detention or extraordinary rendition by the CIA.

And now – to turn to a program that is in many respects the flip side of extraordinary rendition (assuming a dark side can have another dark side) – the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London has announced an ambitious campaign to identify and name all the victims of US-directed air strikes in Pakistan.

The Bureau’s Chris Woods explains:

‘Part of the justification for the US carrying out drone strikes without consent is their reported success. And naming those militants killed is key to that process. Al Qaeda bomber Fahd al-Quso’s death was widely celebrated. Yet how many newspapers also registered the death of Mohamed Saleh Al-Suna, a civilian caught up and killed in a US strike in Yemen on March 30? By showing only one side of the coin, we risk presenting a distorted picture of this new form of warfare. There is an obligation to identify all of those killed…’

And, yes, we also need to recover the names of those killed by other actors too. None of them are ‘just “collateral damage” or abstractions’.

The principle is developed more generally by the Every Casualty project of the Oxford Research Group.

The purpose of the Every Casualty (EC) programme is to enhance the technical, legal and institutional capacity, as well as the political will, to record details of every single casualty of armed conflict throughout the world, civilian as well as combatant. Civilian deaths are particularly poorly documented, and often not recorded at all. Where death tolls are limited to purely numerical assessments, exaggerated, politicised claims and counter-claims frequently abound. By contrast, where Western nations are engaged in conflicts, they meticulously record their military dead not as numbers but by name.

Such detailed, verifiable and comprehensive recording when extended to all victims provides both a memorial for posterity and public recognition of our common humanity. Careful and respectful records ensure that the human cost of conflict is better understood and can become an immediately applicable resource for conflict prevention and post-conflict recovery and reconciliation.

But I think it’s probably a mistake to privilege names over numbers: numbers matter too, and – whatever the legal-humanitarian reasons for recovering the names – they also help us to imagine what the raw numbers mean. There are other ways of achieving the same end, and they don’t necessarily involve abandoning anonymity. I’ve never forgotten the final scene in Richard Attenborough‘s film of “Oh, what a lovely war!”; the shot begins with a single white cross and then pans back and back and back, seemingly without end, until the screen is filled with a sea of 100, 000 crosses [start at 2:21].