The United States of Fear (16 page)

War by its nature is often asymmetrical. The retreat that turns into a rout that turns into a slaughter is a relative commonplace of battle. But it cannot be war, as anyone has ever understood the word, if one side is
never
in danger. And yet that is American air war as it has developed since World War II.

It’s a long path from knightly aerial jousting to air war as . . . well, what? We have no language for it, because accurate labels would prove deflating, pejorative, and exceedingly uncomfortable. You would perhaps need to speak of cadets at the Air Force Academy being prepared for “air slaughter” or “air assassination,” depending on the circumstances.

From those cadets to the secretary of defense to reporters covering our wars, no one here is likely to accept the taking of the “war” out of air war. And because of that, it is—conveniently—almost impossible for Americans to imagine how American-style war must seem to those in the lands where we fight. From the point of view of Afghans, Pakistanis, or other potential target peoples, those drones buzzing in the sky must seem very much like real-life versions of the Predator, that sci-fi alien hunter of human prey, or a Terminator, that machine version of the same. They must, that is, seem alien and implacable like so many malign gods. After all, the weaponry from those planes is loosed without recourse. No one on the ground can do a thing to prevent it and little to defend themselves. And often enough the missiles and bombs kill the innocent along with those our warriors consider the guilty.

To take one example, among many, consider the story behind this
New York Times
headline: “Nine Afghan Boys Collecting Firewood Killed by NATO Helicopters.” On March 1, 2011, in Afghanistan’s Kunar Province, ten boys, including two sets of brothers, were collecting wood for their families when the predators—this time American helicopters evidently looking for insurgents who had rocketed a nearby American base—arrived. Only one of the boys survived. He described the experience as one of being “hunted”—as the Predator hunts humans or human hunters stalk animals. They “hovered over us,” he said, “scanned us, and we saw a green flash.” Then the helicopters rose and began firing. For this particular nightmare, war commander General David Petraeus apologized directly to Afghan president Hamid Karzai, who has for years fruitlessly denounced U.S. and NATO air operations that have killed Afghan civilians. When an angered Karzai refused to accept his apology, Secretary of Defense Gates, on a surprise visit to the country, apologized as well, as did President Obama. And that was that—for the Americans.

Forget for a moment what this incident tells us about a form of warfare in which helicopter pilots, reasonably close to the ground (and modestly more vulnerable than pilots in planes), can’t tell boys with sticks from insurgents with guns. The crucial thing to keep in mind is that, no matter how many apologies may be offered afterwards, this can’t stop. According to the
Wall Street Journal
, death by helicopter is, in fact, on the rise. It’s in the nature of this kind of warfare. In fact, Afghan civilians have repeatedly, even repetitiously, been blown away from the air, with or without apologies, since 2001.

In the weeks that preceded the killing of those boys, for instance, a “NATO”—these are usually American—air attack took out four Afghan security guards protecting the work of a road construction firm and wounded a fifth, according to the police chief of Helmand Province. A similar “deeply regrettable incident” took out an Afghan army soldier, his wife, and his four children in Nangarhar Province. And a third, also in Kunar Province, wiped out 65 civilians, including women and children, according to Afghan government officials. Visiting a hospital afterward, Karzai wept as he held a child whose leg had been amputated after being wounded in the attack.

The U.S. military did not weep. Instead, it rejected this claim of civilian deaths, insisting as it often does that the dead were “insurgents.” It simply announced—and this is typical—that it was “investigating” the incident. General Petraeus managed to further offend Afghan officials when he visited the presidential palace in Kabul and reportedly claimed that some of the wounded children might have suffered burns not in an air attack but from their parents as punishment for bad behavior and were being counted in the casualty figures only to make them look worse.

Over the years, Afghan civilian casualties from the air have waxed and waned, depending on how much air power American commanders were willing to call in, but they have never ceased. As history tells us, air power and civilian deaths are inextricably bound together. They can’t be separated, no matter how much anyone talks about “surgical” strikes and precision bombing. It’s simply the barbaric essence, the very nature of this kind of war, to kill noncombatants.

One question sometimes raised about such casualties in Afghanistan is this: according to UN statistics, Taliban fighters (via roadside bombs and suicide bombers) kill far more civilians, including women and children, than do NATO forces, so why do the U.S.-caused deaths stick so in Afghan craws when we periodically investigate, apologize, and even pay survivors for their losses?
New York Times
reporter Alissa J. Rubin, puzzling over this, offered the following answer: “[T]hose that are caused by NATO troops appear to reverberate more deeply because of underlying animosity about foreigners in the country.” This seems reasonable as far as it goes, but don’t discount what air power adds to the foreignness of the situation.

Consider what the twenty-year-old brother of two of the dead boys from the Kunar helicopter attack told the
Wall Street Journal
in a phone interview: “The only option I have is to pick up a Kalashnikov, RPG [rocket-propelled grenade], or a suicide vest to fight.”

Whatever the Taliban may be, they remain part of Afghan society. They are there on the ground. They kill and they commit barbarities, but they suffer, too. In our version of air “war,” however, the killing and the dying are perfectly and precisely, even surgically, separated. We kill, they die. It’s that simple. Sometimes the ones we target to die do so, sometimes others stand in their stead. But no matter. We then deny, argue, investigate, apologize, and continue. We are, in that sense, implacable.

And one more thing: since we are incapable of thinking of ourselves as predators, no less emotionless Terminators, it becomes impossible for us to see that our air “war” on terror is, in reality, a machine for creating what we then call “terrorists.” It is part of an American Global War
for
Terror. In other words, although air power has long been held up as part of the solution to terrorism, and though the American military now regularly boasts about the enemy body counts it produces, and the precision with which it does so, all of that, even when accurate, is also a kind of delusion.

So count on this: there will be no more Top Guns. No knights of the air. No dogfights and sky-jousts. No valor. Just one-sided slaughter and targeted assassinations. That is where air power has ended up. Live with it. 

On stage, it would be farce. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, it’s bound to play out as tragedy.

In March 2010 Barack Obama flew into Afghanistan for six hours, essentially to read the riot act to Afghan president Hamid Karzai, whom his ambassador had only months before termed “not an adequate strategic partner.” Chairman of the Joint Chiefs admiral Mike Mullen followed within a day to deliver his own “stern message.” While still on Air Force One, National Security Adviser James Jones offered reporters a version of the tough talk Obama was bringing with him. Karzai would later see one of Jones’s comments and find it insulting. Brought to his attention as well would be a newspaper article that quoted an anonymous senior U.S. military official as saying of his half-brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, a reputedly corrupt power broker in the southern city of Kandahar: “I’d like him out of there. . . . But there’s nothing that we can do unless we can link him to the insurgency, then we can put him on the [target list] and capture and kill him.” This was tough talk indeed. (As it turned out, in July 2011 Ahmed Wali Karzai was assassinated at his home in Kandahar by a former bodyguard.)

At the time, the media repeatedly pointed out that President Obama, unlike his predecessor, had consciously developed a standoffish relationship with Karzai. Meanwhile, both named and anonymous officials regularly castigated the Afghan president in the press for stealing an election and running a hopelessly corrupt, inefficient government that had little power outside Kabul, the capital. A previously planned Karzai visit to Washington was put on hold to emphasize the toughness of the new approach.

The administration was clearly intent on fighting a better version of the Afghan War with a new commander, a new plan of action, and a tamed Afghan president, a client head of state who would finally accept his lesser place in the greater scheme of things. A little blunt talk, some necessary threats, and the big stick of American power and money were sure to do the trick.

Meanwhile, across the border in Pakistan, the administration was in an all-carrots mood when it came to the local military and civilian leadership—billions of dollars of carrots, in fact. Our top military and civilian officials had all but taken up residence in Islamabad. By March 2010, for instance, Admiral Mullen had already visited the country fifteen times and U.S. dollars (and promises of more) were flowing in. Meanwhile, U.S. Special Operations forces were arriving in the country’s wild borderlands to train the Pakistani Frontier Corps and the skies were filling with CIA-directed unmanned aerial vehicles pounding those same borderlands, where the Pakistani Taliban, al-Qaeda, and other insurgent groups involved in the Afghan War were located. In Pakistan, it was said, a crucial “strategic relationship” was being carefully cultivated.

Skip ahead to mid-May 2010 and somehow, like so many stealthy insurgents, the carrots and sticks had crossed the poorly marked, porous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan heading in opposite directions. On May 12, Karzai was in Washington being given “the red carpet treatment” as part of what was termed an Obama administration “charm offensive” and a “four-day love fest.” The president set aside a rare stretch of hours to entertain Karzai and the planeload of ministers he brought with him.

At a joint news conference, Obama insisted that “perceived tensions” between the two men had been “overstated.” Specific orders went out from the White House to curb public criticism of the Afghan president and give him “more public respect” as “the chief U.S. partner in the war effort.” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton assured Karzai of Washington’s long-term “commitment” to his country, as did Obama and then war commander General Stanley McChrystal. Praise was the order of the day.

John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, interrupted a financial reform debate to invite Karzai onto the Senate floor (an honor not bestowed on a head of state since 1967), where he was mobbed by senators eager to shake his hand. He was once again our man in Kabul. It was a stunning turnaround: a president almost without power in his own country had somehow tamed the commander in chief of the globe’s lone superpower.

Meanwhile, Clinton, who had shepherded the Afghan president on a walk through a “private enclave” in Georgetown and hosted a “glittering reception” for him, appeared on CBS’s
60 Minutes
to flay Pakistan. In the wake of an inept failed car bombing in New York City’s Times Square, she had this stern message to send to the Pakistani leadership: “We want more, we expect more. . . . We’ve made it very clear that if, heaven forbid, an attack like this that we can trace back to Pakistan were to have been successful, there would be very severe consequences.” Such consequences would evidently include a halt to the flow of U.S. aid to a country in economically disastrous shape. So much for the carrots.

According to the
Washington Post
, General McChrystal delivered a “similar message” to the chief of staff of the Pakistani army. To back up Clinton’s public threats and McChrystal’s private ones, hordes of anonymous American military and civilian officials were ready to pepper reporters with leaks about the tough love that might now be in store for Pakistan. The same
Post
story, for instance, spoke of “some officials . . . weighing in favor of a far more muscular and unilateral U.S. policy. It would include a geographically expanded use of drone missile attacks in Pakistan and pressure for a stronger U.S. military presence there.”

According to similar accounts, “more pointed” messages were heading for key Pakistanis and “new and stiff warnings” were being issued. Americans were said to be pushing for expanded special operations training programs in the Pakistani tribal areas, while insisting that the Pakistani military launch a major campaign in North Waziristan, the heartland of various resistance groups including possibly al-Qaeda. “The element of threat” was now in the air, according to Tariq Fatemi, a former Pakistani ambassador, while in press reports you could hear rumblings about an “internal debate” in Washington that might result in more American “boots on the ground.”

In other words, in the space of two months the Obama administration had flip-flopped when it came to who exactly was to be pressured and who reassured. A typically anonymous “former U.S. official who advises the administration on Afghan policy” caught the moment well in a comment to the
Wall Street Journal
. “This whole bending over backwards to show Karzai the red carpet,” he told journalist Peter Spiegel, “is a result of not having had a concerted strategy for how to grapple with him.”

On a larger scale, the flip-flop seemed to reflect tactical and strategic incoherence—and not just in relation to Karzai. To all appearances, when it comes to the administration’s two South Asian wars, one open, one more hidden, Obama and his top officials were flailing around. For all the policy reviews and shuttling officials, the surging troops, extra private contractors, and new bases, Obama’s wars were worsening. Lacking was any coherent regional policy or semblance of real strategy—counter­insurgency being only a method of fighting and a set of tactics for doing so. In place of strategic coherence there was just one knee-jerk response: escalation. As unexpected events gripped the Obama administration by the throat, its officials increasingly acted as if further escalation were their only choice, their fated choice.