“America’s precision bombs are indeed precise: They hit their targets with near-unerring accuracy.”
The message that comes from Azmat Khan’s articles on American airstrikes in the Middle East is a very clear one: civilians aren’t compromised in air-warfare by bombs that miss their targets, they are compromised by the personnel, the institution, deploying them. And, as inevitable as collateral damage is in warfare, to characterize the civilian lives lost in air warfare waged by America in the Middle East as “collateral damage” would be amiss. It is blatant institutional apathy that caused civilian casualties in Iraq and Syria. As Azat Khan notes, “What I saw after studying them [the pentagon records] was not a series of tragic errors but a pattern of impunity: of a failure to detect civilians, to investigate on the ground, to identify causes and lessons learned, to discipline anyone or find wrongdoing that would prevent these recurring problems from happening again.”
The air campaign was launched with the promise that it would “allow the military to kill the right people” and minimize harm “to the wrong ones.” When this promise is construed in the greater context of what inspired the air campaign – the unpopularity of the “forever wars” in the American public due to the loss of American service members – an unsettling message is conveyed. The replacement of American lives from the equation of loss by “an arsenal of aircraft directed by controllers sitting at computers” prompted such a different attitude to lives involved in the war. When 6,000 American lives were lost an effort was made to minimize the harm to lives, but when the lives of Syrian and Iraqi civilians were lost in the air campaign launched as an alternative to sending troops no effort was made to mitigate that loss. In practice, the promise of the campaign was saving American lives, not innocent lives, because as Azmat Khan says, “while many [civilian deaths] might have been averted through additional precautions — widening the surveillance camera’s field of view or deploying additional drones — the phenomenon continued unabated, amid the intense pace of battle and a shortage of surveillance aircraft.”
In the The Other Afghan Women, Anand Gopal brings to attention a story from a different kind of American warfare: Intervention turned occupation. In the story of Shakira’s life in Afghanistan, she went from considering the Americans (before their arrival in Afghanistan) the liberators, a view the Americans held of themselves, to viewing them as supporters of the terrorist “Dado” after interacting with them. This shift in perspective of American intervention evident in Shakira’s account of events was applicable outside of her own experience, and was a result of America’s ignorance of the local dynamics. As Gopal summarizes: “the U.S. did not attempt to settle such divides and build durable, inclusive institutions; instead, it intervened in a civil war, supporting one side against the other.” Conversely, she also went from despising the Taliban when they banned the production of opium in her village to having hope on their side of the fight, perhaps because in the countryside their fight against the injustice done by the foreigners took the only form of fighting accessible to them – joining the Taliban. On the other hand, the story of Taban Ibraz in the kitchen sisters – a journalist dressed in modern attire working in Kabul on the day the Taliban took control of it, had a very different reaction. To her the Taliban taking control didn’t just mean she had to quit her job, but also forgo her freedom. Something I find Gopal emphasizing really well in his piece is the distinction between lives in the countryside from those lived in the cities during American occupation, and after American exit. Because when I read coverage of the war, the general narrative shifted from relative political stability and liberation of women during the occupation to violent chaos and oppression of women after the exit – which while true of the cities, eclipsed an entirely different side of the lived experience of the war by people like Shakira in the countryside.
