Exploring Death in Waziristan from post-9/11 United States Led Drone Warfare

Photo: Chris Pecoraro via Getty Images

Blog post by Sheher Bano

Located in northwestern Pakistan, bordering Afghanistan, Waziristan is part of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas located in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. In 2009, then president of the United States Barack Obama called Waziristan “the most dangerous place in the world” – a statement rooted in long sustained processes of white supremacy, Orientalism and imperialism established by European colonial powers long before Obama’s time (Morris, 2016; Beattie, 2019; Obama, 2009). But why did Obama take it upon himself to indiscriminately label an entire region, where some of Pakistan’s most impoverished reside, as dangerous?

The United States’ use of drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), as militarized technology to carry out offensive attacks in Waziristan has been deemed the more ‘morally efficient approach’ by the Obama administration (Boyle, 2013).  However, the use of UAVs in Waziristan has led to the systemic dehumanization of its civilian population and the justification of their murders through the physical and psychological distancing that occurs through remote violence (Acheson et al, 2017). UAVs are utilized by the United Sates as a mechanized form of terror, the argument of military humanism falls short when there is no human-ness in the drone operations; their targets are largely informed from artificial intelligence collected at a distance, they are operated remotely and often without any human involvement, and their very existence is to limit American military deaths, not local civilian deaths (Allinson, 2015; Gusterson, 2019).

Defining civilian death in Waziristan as “collateral damage” or “ethical slippages” highlights the racialized and systemic dehumanization of the average resident. It contextualizes these drone victims as hapless individuals caught up in the dealings of more powerful actors and removes them from the context of state-sanctioned violence that would have made the state complicit in their killings and, more importantly, naturalizes their killings as a backdrop and consequence of this newfound military humanist strategy (Khan et al, 2023; Gusterson, 2019).

Waziristan has a historicized othering that removes it and all that it encompasses from the state, from sovereignty, resulting in the minimizing and invisibilizing of civilian deaths – are they really deaths, if the civilian was never regarded as part of the sovereign nation in the first place? Are they really deaths, if the civilian was seen as part of the monolithic imagined threat to the sovereign power of the nation-state? (Khan et al, 2023; Mbembe, 2003).

The lives of civilians in Waziristan are not defined by themselves; their being is defined by the US and Pakistani governments; for instance, the Obama administration effectively labelled all men of military age that fell victim to its drone operations as militants in order to distance itself from international law and human rights violations, and to also frame the victims as the ‘Other’– a classic imperialist exercise of the state of exception that removes victims from their human being (Mauk, 2017; Boyle, 2013). Wynter’s (2003) work on the state of human being/non-being explores this latter concept; how the ideological imperial power mechanism defines the Colour Line, and thusly defines and creates the division of the human being/non-being. The Men/Natives divide, and framing the indigenous as beneath humanness, is a racialized ideology that has grievously informed the state of death in Waziristan. Populations making up Waziristan are not considered as part of the larger Pakistani identity, and therefore their deaths are written off from the sovereign security of the nation; the indiscriminate use of drone warfare in their murders is nothing but a ‘necessary consequence’, an ‘ethical consideration’, and a by-product of a newly developed and still tested military humanist technology (Khan et al, 2003; Allison, 2019, Gusterson, 2019).

The surveillance and auditing that drone technology facilitates is yet another factor into the Necropolitics of drone warfare – the person operating the drone from a remote, secure location has the power to decide who is considered disposable, who’s life matters more or less than the sovereign security of the United States (Allison, 2019; Mbembe, 2003). Their power to determine the value of life stems from their positionality within the imperial-colonial, their national identity as American legitimizes the murder and killings they conduct through drone warfare, and the non-Americanness of the victims legitimizes their deaths as a necessary consequence of securing American sovereignty in foreign, occupied soil (Mbembe, 2003).

The mechanized terror of drones permeates beyond the immediate victims and killings, as well – one must also consider the psychological and sociocultural effects and changes that develop in the face of such a large and non-human imperial threat. Drone-created fear in these areas is used to further strengthen extremist insurgency groups and recruit victims, which contributes to the continued justification and need for US drone strikes in the region (Coyne & Hall, 2018; Boyle, 2013). This is the never-ending war that Mbembe (2003) discusses in “Necropolitics”; the imperial-colonial power is not seeking an end to conflict in its occupied territories because there is no end to conflict in the third-zone – the liminal space between subjecthood and objecthood fosters an environment in which the imperial-colonial enterprise can exercise its state of exception, and conduct its operations of death and murder, as the occupied territory it operates in is framed as a continued threat to its sovereignty and power of death.

It is important to distinguish that arguments around the efficacy on military humanism of drone warfare, and the remote operations of UAVs in subsidizing the prevention of deaths of military personnel on the ground are nothing but a smokescreen for the neo-imperialist narrative of the United States. The comfort in being able to decide life and death, and to racialize life in the first instance, without even being physically present is a core part of the imperial mechanism of terror. It is a weak moral argument for the effectiveness of drone warfare and the biopolitics behind it is clear: the lives of Waziristan civilians are not counted as lives lost, for they were never considered as lives – as human beings – in the first place.

Bibliography

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