As the Israelis rediscovered-though, by now, you'd think that military planners with half a brain wouldn't have to destroy a country to do so-it is impossible to "surgically" separate a movement and its supporters from the air. When you try, you invariably do the opposite, fusing them ever more closely, while creating an even larger, ever angrier base for the movement whose essence is, in any case, never literal geography, never simply a set of villages or bunkers or military supplies to be taken and destroyed.

As air wars go, the one in Lebanon in 2006 was strikingly directed against the civilian infrastructure and against society; in that, however, it was historically anything but unique. It might even be said that war from the air, since first launched in Europe's colonies early in the last century, has always been essentially directed against civilians. Air power-no matter its stated targets-almost invariably turns out to be worst for civilians and, in the end, to be aimed at society itself. In that way, its damage is anything but "collateral," never truly "surgical," and never in its overall effect "precise." Even when it doesn't start that way, the frustration of not working as planned, of not breaking the "will," tends to lead, as with the Israelis in 2006, to ever wider, ever fiercer versions of the same, which, if allowed to proceed to their logical conclusion, will bring down not society's will, but society itself.

Lebanon's prime minister may have described Israel's actions as "barbaric destruction," but, in our world, airpower has long been robbed of its barbarism. For us, air war involves dumb hits by smart bombs, collateral damage, and surgery that may do in the patient, but somehow is not barbaric. For that, you need to personally cut off a head.

An Anatomy of Collateral Damage.

In a little noted pa.s.sage in her book The Dark Side, Jane Mayer offered us a vision, just post-9/11, of the value of one. In October 2001, shaken by a nerve gas false alarm at the White House, Vice President d.i.c.k Cheney, reported Mayer, went underground. He literally bunkered himself in "a secure, undisclosed location," which she described as "one of several Cold War-era nuclear-hardened subterranean bunkers built during the Truman and Eisenhower Administrations, the nearest of which were located hundreds of feet below bedrock." That bunker would be dubbed, perhaps only half-sardonically, "The Commander in Chief's Suite."

Oh, and in that period, if Cheney had to be in transit, "he was chauffeured in an armored motorcade that varied its route to foil possible attackers." In the backseat of his car (just in case), added Mayer, "rested a duffel bag stocked with a gas mask and a biochemical survival suit." And lest danger rear its head, "Rarely did he travel without a medical doctor in tow."

When it came to leadership in troubled times, this wasn't exactly a profile in courage. Perhaps it was closer to a profile in paranoia, or simply in fear, but whatever else it might have been, it was also a strange kind of statement of self-worth. Has any wartime president-forget the vice president-including Abraham Lincoln when Southern armies might have marched on Washington, or Franklin D. Roosevelt at the height of World War II, ever been so bizarrely overprotected in the nation's capital? Has any administration ever placed such value on the preservation of the life of a single official?

On the other hand, the well-armored vice president and his aide David Addington played a leading role, as Mayer doc.u.mented in grim detail, in loosing a Global War on Terror that was also a global war of terror on lands thousands of miles distant. In this new war, "the gloves came off," "the shackles were removed"-images much beloved within the administration and, in the case of those "shackles," by George Tenet's CIA. In the process, no price in human abas.e.m.e.nt or human life proved too high to pay-as long as it was paid by someone else.

The Value of None.

If no level of protection was too much for d.i.c.k Cheney, then no protection at all is what Washington offers civilians who happen to live in the ever expanding "war zones" of the planet. In the Middle East, in Somalia, in Pakistan, in Afghanistan, the war-in part from the air, sometimes via pilotless unmanned aerial vehicles or drones-is, in crucial ways, aimed at civilians (though this could never be admitted).

Civilians have few doctors on hand, much less full chemical body suits or gas masks, when disaster strikes. Often they are asleep, or going about their daily business, when death makes its appearance unannounced.

We have no idea just how many civilians have been blown away by the U.S. military (and allies) in recent years, only that the "collateral damage" has been widespread and far more central than anyone here generally cares to acknowledge. Collateral damage has come in myriad ways-from artillery fire in the initial invasion of Iraq; from repeated shootings of civilians in vehicles at checkpoints; from troops (or even private mercenaries) blasting away from convoys; during raids on private homes; in village operations; and, significantly, from the air.

In Afghanistan, air strikes increased tenfold from 2004 to 2007 alone. From 2006 to 2007, civilian deaths from those air strikes nearly tripled. According to Marc Garlasco, a former Pentagon official and military a.n.a.lyst at Human Rights Watch, 317,000 pounds of bombs were dropped in June and 270,000 in July 2008, equaling "the total tonnage dropped in 2006."

As with all figures relating to casualties, the actual counts you get on Afghan civilian dead are approximations and probably undercounts, especially since the war against the Taliban has been taking place largely in the backlands of one (or, if you count Pakistan, two) of the poorest, most remote regions on the planet. And yet we do know something. For instance, although the media have seldom attended to the subject, we know that one subset of innocent civilians has been slaughtered repeatedly. While Americans spent days in October 2006 riveted to TV screens following the murders of five Amish girls by a madman in a one-room schoolhouse in Pennsylvania, and weeks following the ma.s.s slaughter of thirty-two college students by a mad boy at Virginia Tech in April 2007, a number of Afghan wedding parties and at least one Iraqi wedding party were largely wiped out from the air by American planes to hardly any news coverage at all.

The message of these slaughters is that if you live in areas where the Taliban exists, which is now much of Afghanistan, you'd better not gather.

Each of these events was marked by something else-the uniformity of the U.S. response: initial claims that U.S. forces had been fired on first and that those killed were the enemy; a dismissal of the slaughters as the unavoidable "collateral damage" of wartime; and, above all, an unwillingness to genuinely apologize for, or take real responsibility for, having wiped out groups of celebrating locals.

And keep in mind that such disasters are just subsets of a far larger, barely covered story. In July 2008 alone, for example, the U.S. military and NATO officials launched investigations into three air strikes in Afghanistan (including one on a wedding party) in which seventy-eight Afghan civilians were killed.

Since the Afghan War began in 2001, such "incidents" have occurred again and again. The Global War on Terror is premised on an unspoken belief that the lives of others-civilians going about their business in distant lands-are essentially of no importance when placed against American needs and desires. That, you might say, is the value of none.

Incident in Azizabad.

To take one example: on the night of August 21, 2008, a memorial service was held in Azizabad, a village in the Shindand District of Afghanistan's Herat Province, for a tribal leader killed the previous year, who had been, villagers reported, anti-Taliban. Hundreds had attended, including "extended families from two tribes."

That night, a combined party of U.S. Special Forces and Afghan army troops attacked the village. They claimed they were "ambushed" and came under "intense fire." What we know is that they called in repeated air strikes. According to several investigations and the on-the-spot reporting of New York Times journalist Carlotta Gall, at least ninety civilians, including perhaps fifteen women and up to sixty children, died that night. As many as seventy-six members of a single extended family were killed, along with its head, Reza Khan. His compound seems to have been specially targeted.

Khan, it turns out, was no Taliban "militant," but a "wealthy businessman with construction and security contracts with the nearby American base at Shindand airport." He reportedly had a private security company that worked for the U.S. military at the airport and also owned a cell phone business in the town of Herat. He had a card "issued by an American Special Forces officer that designated [him] as a 'coordinator for the U.S.S.F.'" Eight of the other men killed that night, according to Gall, worked as guards for a private American security firm. At least two dead men had served in the Afghan police and fought against the Taliban.

The incident in Azizabad represents one of the deadliest media-verified attacks on civilians by U.S. forces since the invasion of 2001. Numerous buildings were damaged. Many bodies, including those of children, had to be dug out of the rubble. There may have been as many as sixty children among the dead. The U.S. military evidently launched its attack after being given false information by another person in the area with a grudge against Khan and his brother. As one tribal elder, who helped bury the dead, put it: "It is quite obvious, the Americans bombed the area due to wrong information. I am 100 percent confident that someone gave the information due to a tribal dispute. The Americans are foreigners and they do not understand. These people they killed were enemies of the Taliban."

Repeated U.S. air attacks resulting in civilian deaths have proven a disaster for Afghan president Hamid Karzai. He promptly denounced the strikes against Azizabad, fired two Afghan commanders, including the top-ranking officer in western Afghanistan, for "negligence and concealing facts," and ordered his own investigation of the incident. His team of investigators concluded that more than ninety Afghan civilians had indeed died. Along with the Afghan Council of Ministers, Karzai also demanded a "review" of "the presence of international forces and agreements with foreign allies, including NATO and the United States."

Ahmad Nader Nadery, commissioner of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, similarly reported that one of the group's researchers had "found that 88 people had been killed, including 20 women." The UN mission in Afghanistan then dispatched its own investigative team from Herat to interview survivors. Its investigation "found convincing evidence, based on the testimony of eyewitnesses, and others, that some 90 civilians were killed, including 60 children, 15 women and 15 men." (The 60 children were reportedly "3 months old to 16 years old, all killed as they slept.")

The American Response.

Given the weight of evidence at Azizabad, the on-site investigations, the many graves, the destroyed houses, the specificity of survivor accounts, and so on, this might have seemed like a cut-and-dried case of mistaken intelligence followed by an errant a.s.sault with disastrous consequences. But accepting such a conclusion simply isn't in the playbook of the U.S. military.

Instead, in such cases what you regularly get is a predictable U.S. narrative about what happened made up of outlandish claims (or simply lies), followed by a strategy of stonewalling, including a blame-the-victims approach in which civilian deaths are regularly dismissed as enemy-inspired "propaganda," followed-if the pressure doesn't ease up-by the announcement of an "investigation" (whose results will rarely be released), followed by an expression of "regrets" or "sorrow" for the loss of life-both weasel words that can be uttered without taking actual responsibility for what happened-never to be followed by a genuine apology.

Now, let's consider the American response to Azizabad.

The numbers: Initially, the U.S. military flatly denied that any civilians had been killed in the village. In the operation, they claimed, exactly 30 Taliban "militants" had died. ("Insurgents engaged the soldiers from multiple points within the compound using small-arms and RPG [rocket-propelled grenade] fire. The joint forces responded with small-arms fire and an air strike killing 30 militants.") Targeted, they said, had been a single compound holding a local Taliban commander, later identified as Mullah Sadiq, who was killed. (Sadiq would subsequently call Radio Liberty to indicate that he was still very much alive and to deny that he had been in the village that night.) Quickly enough, however, military spokespeople began backing off. Brigadier General Richard Blanchette, a NATO spokesperson, said that "investigators sent to the site immediately after the bombing" had, in fact, verified the deaths of three women and two children, who were suspected of being relatives of the dead Taliban commander.

After President Karzai's angry denunciation, and the results of his team's investigation were released, the U.S. military altered its account slightly, admitting that only twenty-five Taliban fighters had actually died alongside five Afghans identified as "noncombatants," including a woman and two children. The U.S. command, however, remained "very confident" that only thirty Afghans had been killed. Later, after a military investigation had been launched, the U.S. command in Afghanistan issued a vague statement indicating that "coalition forces are aware of allegations that the engagement in the Shindand district of Herat Province, Friday, may have resulted in civilian casualties apart from those already reported."

On August 28, the U.S. military "investigation" released its results, confirming that only thirty Afghans had died. On August 29, however, General David D. McKiernan, American commander of NATO forces, raised the number, suggesting that "up to 40" Afghans might have died, though still insisting that only five of them had been civilians, the rest being "men of military age." These revised numbers were still being touted on September 2, when, according to the Washington Post, "U.S. military officials flatly rejected" the Afghan and UN figures. On September 4, the Los Angeles Times reported that the U.S. military was now "acknowledging" thirty-five militants and seven civilians-forty-two Afghans-had died in the attack. Over a span of two weeks, the Americans slowly gave way on those previously definitive figures, moving modestly closer to the ones offered by the Karzai and UN teams, without ever giving way on their version of what had happened.

The investigations: The first investigation, according to U.S. military spokespeople, occurred the morning after the attack, when investigators from the attacking force supposedly went house to house "a.s.sessing damage and casualties" and "taking photos." Combat photographers were said to have "doc.u.mented the scene." According to Gall, the U.S. military claimed its forces had made a "thorough sweep of this small western hamlet, a building-by-building search a few hours after the air strikes, and a return visit on Aug. 26, which villagers insist never occurred."

As claims of civilian deaths mounted and Karzai denounced the attacks, Major General Jeffrey J. Schloesser, then commander of coalition forces in Afghanistan, ordered an "investigation" into the episode. ("All allegations of civilian casualties are taken very seriously. Coalition forces make every effort to prevent the injury or loss of innocent lives. An investigation has been directed.") On August 29, the conclusions of the investigation, completed in near-record time, were released. The casualty count-only thirty Afghans, twenty-five of them Taliban militants-had been definitively confirmed. A future "joint investigation" with the Afghan government was, however, proposed. That same day, General McKiernan suggested that the UN, too, should be part of the joint investigation. On September 3, the Afghans accepted the U.S. proposal for what was now a "tripart.i.te investigation." On September 7, "emerging evidence"-a grainy video taken on a cell phone by a doctor in Azizabad, "showing dozens of civilian bodies, including those of numerous children, prepared for burial"-led General McKiernan to ask that the U.S. investigation be reopened. Normally, such investigations, whose results usually remain cla.s.sified, are no more than sops, meant to quiet matters until attention dies away. In this case, the minimalist military investigation, which merely backed up the initial cover-up about the a.s.sault on Azizabad, was forced into the open and, as protest in Afghanistan widened, was essentially consigned to the trash heap of history.

The rhetoric: Initially, according to the Washington Post, "a U.S. military spokeswoman dismissed as 'outrageous' the Afghan government's a.s.sertions that scores of civilians had been killed in the attack.... A U.S. official in Washington, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the Taliban has become adept at spreading false intelligence to draw U.S. strikes on civilians." In not-for-attribution comments, U.S. military officials would later suggest "that the villagers fabricated such evidence as grave sites." Lieutenant Colonel Rumi Nielson-Green, a spokesperson for the U.S. military, insisted: "We're confident that we struck the right compound." On August 24, as protests over the deaths at Azizabad mounted in Afghanistan, White House spokesperson Tony Fratto said at a press gaggle: "We regret the loss of life among the innocent Afghanis who we are committed to protect.... Coalition forces take precautions to prevent the loss of civilians, unlike the Taliban and militants who target civilians and place civilians in harm's way."

On August 25, Fratto added: "We believe from what we've heard from officials at the Department of Defense that they believe it was a good strike.... I should tell you, though, first of all, we obviously mourn the loss of any innocent civilians that may lose their lives in these attacks in-whether they're in Afghanistan or in Iraq, in any of these conflict areas." On that same day, Pentagon spokesperson Bryan Whitman said: "We continue at this point to believe that this was a legitimate strike against the Taliban. Unfortunately there were some civilian casualties, although that figure is in dispute, I would say. But this is why it is being investigated."

On August 27, at a Pentagon press conference, Commandant of the Marine Corps General James Conway said:[I]f the reports of the Afghan civilian casualties are accurate-and sometimes that is a big "if" because I think we all understand the Taliban capabilities with regard to information operations-but if that proves out, that will be truly an unfortunate incident. And we need to avoid that, certainly, at every cost....

You know, air power is the premiere asymmetric advantage that we hold over both the Taliban and, for that matter, the al Qaeda in Iraq.... And when we find that you're up against hardened people in a hardened type of compound, before we throw our Marines or soldiers against that, we're going to take advantage of our asymmetric advantage....

You don't always know what's in that compound, unfortunately.

And sometimes we think there's been overt efforts on the part of the Taliban, in particular, to surround themselves with civilians so as to, at a minimum, reap an IO [information operations] advantage if civilians are killed.

On August 29, General McKiernan reiterated the American position, while expressing regrets for any loss of civilian life: "This was a legitimate insurgent target. We regret the loss of civilian life, but the numbers that we find on this target area are nowhere near the number reported in the media, and that we believe there was a very deliberate information operation orchestrated by the insurgency, by the Taliban." He also complained about the UN investigation, saying, "I am very disappointed in the United Nations because they have not talked to this headquarters before they made that release," and he suggested that President Karzai had been the victim of bad information.

On September 3, with pressure growing, U.S. amba.s.sador to the UN Zalmay Khalilzad put the disparities in numbers down to the "fog of war," while urging a new joint investigation: "I believe that there is a bit of a fog of war involved in some of these initial reports. Sometimes initial reports can be wrong. And the best way to deal with it is to have the kind of investigation that we have proposed, which is U.S., coalition, plus the Afghan government, plus the United Nations." On the same day, Karzai's office issued a statement indicating that President Bush had phoned the Afghan president: "The President of America has expressed his regret and sympathy for the occurrence of Shindand incident." They quoted him as saying, "I am a partner in your loss and that of the Afghan people." Also that same day, General McKiernan said: "Every death of a civilian in wartime is a terrible tragedy. Even one death is too many.... I wish to again express my sincere condolences and apologies to the families whose loved ones were inadvertently killed in the cross fire with the insurgents in Azizabad." Though the Afghans seem to have largely died due to U.S. air strikes, not in a crossfire, this was as close to an apology as anyone related to the U.S. government or military has come.

Under fire for its account of the raid, the U.S. military was quick to point out that its now discredited findings at Azizabad "were corroborated by an independent journalist embedded with the U.S. force." That man turned out to be none other than Oliver North, working for FOX News. North had not only gained notoriety as an official of, a defender of, and a shredder of papers for the Reagan administration in the Iran-Contra scandal, but had earlier fought in Vietnam. He actually appeared as a witness for the defense in the case of one of the marines accused of carrying out a ma.s.sacre of Vietnamese at Son Thang in February 1970.

As now, so in Vietnam, were "hearts and minds" being hunted both from the air and on the ground; so, too, civilians were repeatedly blown away there; and so, too, as in the case of the infamous My Lai ma.s.sacre, cover stories were fabricated to explain how civilians-Vietnamese peasants-had died and those stories were publicized by the U.S. military, even though they bore little or no relation to what had actually happened.

Today, "hearts and minds" are being similarly hunted across large stretches of the planet, and people in surprising numbers continue to die while simply trying to lead their lives.

This sort of "collateral damage" is an ongoing modern nightmare, which, unlike dead Amish girls or school shootings, does not fascinate either our media or, evidently, Americans generally. It seems we largely don't want to know what happened, and generally speaking, that's lucky because the media isn't particularly interested in telling us. This is one reason the often absurd accounts sometimes offered by the U.S. military go relatively unchallenged-as, fortunately, they did not in the case of the incident at Azizabad.

Of course, it matters what you value and what you dismiss as valueless. When you overvalue yourself and undervalue others, you naturally overestimate your own power and are remarkably blind to the potential power of others.

In this way, not just Vice President Cheney but President Bush and his top officials remained self-protectively embunkered throughout their years in office. The sixty or so children slaughtered in Azizabad, each of whom belonged to some family, did not matter to them. But those children do matter. And when you kill them, and so many others like them, you surely play with fire.

Launching the Drone Wars.

In 1984, Skynet, the supercomputer that rules a future Earth, sent a cyborg a.s.sa.s.sin, a "terminator," back to our time. His job was to liquidate the woman who would give birth to John Connor, the leader of the underground human resistance of Skynet's time. You with me so far?

That, of course, was the plot of the first Terminator movie, and for the multimillions who saw it, the images of future machine war-of hunter-killer drones flying above a wasted landscape-are unforgettable. Since then, as Hollywood's special effects took off, there have been three sequels, during which the original terminator somehow morphed into a friendlier figure on-screen, and even more miraculously, off-screen, into the humanoid governor of California.

Meanwhile, hunter-killer drones haven't waited for Hollywood. Actual unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), pilotless surveillance and a.s.sa.s.sination drones armed with h.e.l.lfire missiles, are now patrolling our expanding global battlefields, hunting down human beings. And in the Pentagon and the labs of defense contractors, UAV supporters are already talking about and working on next-generation machines. Post-2020, according to these dreamers, drones will be able to fly and fight, discern enemies and incinerate them without human decision-making. They're even discussing just how to program human ethics-or, rather, American ethics-into them.

It may never happen, but it should still give us pause that there are people eager to bring the fifth iteration of Terminator not to local multiplexes, but to the skies of our perfectly real world-and that the Pentagon is already funding them to do so.

As futuristic weapons planning went, UAVs started out pretty low-tech in the 1990s. Even in 2009, the most commonplace of the two American armed drones, the Predator, cost only $4.5 million a pop, while the most advanced model, the Reaper-both are produced by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems of San Diego-came in at $15 million. (Compare that to $350 million for a single F-22 Raptor, which proved essentially useless in America's recent counterinsurgency wars.) It's lucky UAVs are cheap, since they are also p.r.o.ne to crashing.

UAVs came to life as surveillance tools during the wars over the former Yugoslavia, were armed by February 2001, were hastily pressed into operation in Afghanistan after 9/11, and like many weapons systems, began to evolve generationally. As they did, they developed from surveillance eyes in the sky into something far more sinister and previously restricted to terra firma: a.s.sa.s.sins. One of the earliest armed acts of a CIA-piloted Predator, back in November 2002, was an a.s.sa.s.sination mission over Yemen in which a jeep, reputedly transporting six suspected al-Qaeda operatives, was incinerated.

Today, the advanced UAV, the Reaper, housing up to four h.e.l.lfire missiles and two 500-pound bombs, packs the sort of punch once reserved for a jet fighter. Dispatched to the skies over the farthest reaches of the American empire, powered by a 1,000-horsepower turbo prop engine at its rear, the Reaper can fly at up to 21,000 feet for up to twenty-two hours (until fuel runs short), streaming back live footage from three cameras (or sending it to troops on the ground)-16,000 hours of video a month. There is no need to worry about a pilot dozing off during those twenty-two hours. The human crews "piloting" the drones, often from thousands of miles away, just change shifts when tired. So the planes are left to endlessly cruise Iraqi, Afghan, and Pakistani skies relentlessly seeking out, like so many terminators, specific enemies whose ident.i.ties can, under certain circ.u.mstances (or so the claims go) be determined even through the walls of houses. When a "target" is found and agreed upon-in Pakistan, the permission of Pakistani officials to fire is no longer considered necessary-and a missile or bomb is unleashed, the cameras are so powerful that "pilots" can watch the facial expressions of those being liquidated on their computer monitors "as the bomb hits."

Approximately 5,500 UAVs, mostly unarmed-less than 250 of them are Predators and Reapers-operated in 2009 over Iraq and the so-called Af-Pak (Afghanistan-Pakistan) theater of operations. Part of the more than century-long development of war in the air, drones have become favorites of U.S. military planners.

And yet, keep in mind that the UAV still remains in its (frightening) infancy. Such machines are not, of course, advanced cyborgs. They are in some ways not even all that advanced. Because someone wants publicity for the drone-war program, reporters from the United States and elsewhere have been given "rare behind-the-scenes" looks at how it works. As a result, and also because the "covert war" in the skies over Pakistan makes Washington's secret warriors proud enough to regularly leak news of its "successes," we know something more about how our drone wars work.

We know, for instance, that at least part of the air force's Afghan UAV program runs out of Kandahar Air Base in southern Afghanistan. It turns out that, pilotless as the planes may be, a pilot does have to be nearby to guide them into the air and handle landings. As soon as the drone is up, a two-man team, a pilot and a "sensor monitor," backed by intelligence experts and meteorologists, takes over the controls either at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, Arizona, or at Creech Air Force Base northwest of Las Vegas, Nevada, some 7,000-odd miles away. (Other U.S. bases may be involved, as well, including Al-Udeid Air Base, a billion-dollar facility in the Persian Gulf nation of Qatar from which the air force evidently oversees its drone wars.) According to Christopher Drew of the New York Times, who visited Davis-Monthan, where Air National Guard members handle the controls, the pilots sit unglamorously "at 1990s-style computer banks filled with screens, inside dimly lit trailers." Depending on the needs of the moment, they can find themselves "over" either Afghanistan or Iraq, or even both on the same work shift. All of this is remarkably mundane-pilot complaints generally run to problems "transitioning" back to wife and children after a day at the joystick over battle zones-and at the same time, right out of Ali Baba's One Thousand and One Nights.

In those dimly lit trailers, the UAV teams have taken on an almost G.o.dlike power. Their job is to survey a place thousands of miles distant (and completely alien to their lives and experiences), a.s.sess what they see, and spot "targets" to eliminate-even if on their somewhat antiquated computer systems it "takes up to 17 steps-including entering data into pull-down windows-to fire a missile" and incinerate those below. They only face danger when they leave the job: a sign at Creech warns a pilot to "drive carefully" because this is "the most dangerous part of your day." Those involved claim that the fear and thrill of battle do not completely escape them, but the descriptions we now have of their world sound discomfortingly like a cross between the far frontiers of sci-fi and a call center in India.

The most intense of our various drone wars, the one on the other side of the Afghan border in Pakistan, is also the most mysterious. We know that some or all of the drones engaged in it take off from Pakistani airfields; that this "covert war" (which regularly makes front-page news) is run by the CIA out of its headquarters in Langley, Virginia; that its pilots are also located somewhere in the United States; and that at least some of them are hired private contractors.

William Saletan of Slate has described our drones as engaged in "a bloodless, all-seeing airborne hunting party." Of course, in the twenty-first century what was once an elite activity performed in person has been transformed into a 24/7 industrial activity fit for human drones.

Our drone wars also represent a new chapter in the history of a.s.sa.s.sination. Once upon a time, to be an a.s.sa.s.sin for a government was a furtive, shameful thing. In those days, of course, an a.s.sa.s.sin, if successful, took down a single person, not the targeted individual and anyone in the vicinity (or simply, if targeting intelligence proves wrong, anyone in the vicinity). No more poison-dart-tipped umbrellas, as in past KGB operations, or toxic cigars, as in CIA ones. a.s.sa.s.sination has taken to the skies as an everyday, year-round activity. Today, we increasingly display our a.s.sa.s.sination wares with pride. To us, at least, it seems perfectly normal for aerial a.s.sa.s.sination operations to be a part of an open discussion in Washington and in the media. Consider this a new definition of "progress" in our world.

Proliferation and Sovereignty.

One of the truths of our time is that no weapons system, no matter where first created, can be kept as private property for long. Today, we talk not of arms races, but of "proliferation," which is what you have once a global arms race of one takes hold. But don't for a minute imagine that those hunter-killer skies dominated by Predators and Reapers won't someday fill with the drones of other nations. The Chinese, the Russians, the Israelis, the Pakistanis, the Georgians, and the Iranians, among others, already have drones. In 2006, Hezbollah flew drones over Israel. In fact, if you have the skills, you can create your own drone, more or less in your living room (as do-it-yourself drone websites make clear).

Undoubtedly, the future holds unnerving possibilities not just for states, but for small groups intent on a.s.sa.s.sination from the air. Already the skies are growing more crowded. In March 2009, not long after coming into office, President Barack Obama issued what Reuters termed "an unprecedented videotaped appeal to Iran...offering a 'new beginning' of diplomatic engagement to turn the page on decades of U.S. policy toward America's longtime foe." It was in the form of a Persian New Year's greeting. But, as the New York Times also reported, the U.S. military beat the president to the punch. They sent their own "greetings" to the Iranians a couple of days earlier. The U.S. military sent out Colonel James Hutton to meet the press and "confirm" that "allied aircraft" had shot down an "Iranian unmanned aerial vehicle" over Iraq on February 25, more than three weeks earlier. Between that day and mid-March, the relevant Iraqi military and civilian officials were, the Times tells us, not informed. The reason? That drone was intruding on our (borrowed) airs.p.a.ce, not theirs. You probably didn't know it, but according to an Iraqi Defense Ministry spokesperson, "protection of Iraqi airs.p.a.ce remains an American responsibility for the next three years." And naturally enough, we don't want other countries' drones in "our" airs.p.a.ce, though that's hardly likely to stop them. The Iranians, for instance, have already announced the development of "a new generation of 'spy drones' that provide real-time surveillance over enemy terrain."

Of course, when you openly control squads of a.s.sa.s.sination drones patrolling airs.p.a.ce over other countries, you've already made a mockery of whatever national sovereignty might once have meant. It's a precedent that might someday even make us distinctly uncomfortable. But not right now.

If you doubt this, check out the stream of self-congratulatory comments being leaked by Washington officials about our drone a.s.sa.s.sins. These often lead off news pieces about America's "covert war" over Pakistan ("An intense, six-month campaign of Predator strikes in Pakistan has taken such a toll on Al Qaeda that militants have begun turning violently on one another out of confusion and distrust, U.S. intelligence and counter-terrorism officials say"). But be sure to read to the end of such pieces. Somewhere in them, after the successes have been touted and toted up, you get the real news: "In fact, the stepped-up strikes have coincided with a deterioration in the security situation in Pakistan."

In Pakistan, a war of machine a.s.sa.s.sins is visibly provoking terror-and terrorism-as well as anger and hatred among people who are by no means fundamentalists. It is part of a larger destabilization of the country.

The Future Awaits Us.

If you want to read the single most chilling line yet uttered about drone warfare American-style, it comes at the end of Christopher Drew's piece. He quotes Brookings Inst.i.tution a.n.a.lyst Peter Singer saying of our Predators and Reapers, "these systems today are very much Model T Fords. These things will only get more advanced." In other words, our drone wars are being fought with the airborne equivalent of cars with cranks, but the "race" to the horizon is already under way. Soon, some Reapers will have a far more sophisticated sensor system with twelve cameras capable of filming a two-and-a-half mile round area from twelve different angles. That program has been dubbed "Gorgon Stare," but it doesn't compare to the future 92-camera Argus program whose initial development is being funded by the Pentagon's blue-skies outfit, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Soon enough, a single pilot may be capable of handling not one but perhaps three drones, and drone armaments will undoubtedly grow progressively more powerful and "precise." In the meantime, BAE Systems already has a drone four years into development, the Taranis, that should someday be "completely autonomous," meaning it theoretically will operate without human pilots. Initial trials of a prototype were scheduled for 2010. By 2020, so claim UAV enthusiasts, drones could be engaging in aerial battle and choosing their victims themselves. As Robert S. Boyd of McClatchy reported, "The Defense Department is financing studies of autonomous, or self-governing, armed robots that could find and destroy targets on their own. On-board computer programs, not flesh-and-blood people, would decide whether to fire their weapons."

It's a particular sadness of our world that, in Washington, only the military can dream about the future in this way, and then fund the "arms race" of 2018 or 2035. Rest a.s.sured that no one with a governmental red cent is researching the health care system of 2018 or 2035, or the public education system of those years.

In the meantime, the skies of our world are filling with round-the-clock a.s.sa.s.sins. They will only evolve and proliferate. Of course, when we check ourselves out in the movies, we like to identify with John Connor, the human resister, the good guy of this planet, against the evil machines. Elsewhere, however, as we fight our drone wars ever more openly, as we field mechanical techno-terminators with all-seeing eyes and loose our missiles from thousands of miles away ("Hasta la vista, baby!"), we undoubtedly look like something other than a nation of John Connors to those living under the Predators.

True, we can't send our drones into the past to wipe out the young Ayman al-Zawahiri in Cairo or the teenage Osama bin Laden speeding down some Saudi road in his gray Mercedes sedan. True, the UAV enthusiasts, who are already imagining all-drone wars run by "ethical" machines, may never see anything like their fantasies come to pa.s.s. Still, the fact that without the help of a single advanced cyborg we are already in the process of creating a Terminator planet should give us pause for thought...or not.

FOUR.