The Language of War, American-Style.

Which War Is This Anyway?

Consider this description:The "rebels" or "freedom fighters" are part of a nationwide "resistance movement." While many of them are local, even tribal, and fight simply because they are outraged by the occupation of their country, hundreds of others among the "resistance fighters"-young Arabs-are arriving from as far away as "Lebanon, Syria, Egypt and Jordan," not to speak of Saudi Arabia and Algeria, to engage in jihad, ready as one of them puts it, to stay in the war "until I am martyred." Fighting for their "Islamic ideals," "they are inspired by a sense of moral outrage and a religious devotion heightened by frequent accounts of divine miracles in the war." They slip across the country's borders to fight the "invader" and the "puppet government" its officials have set up in the capital in their "own image." The invader's sway, however, "extends little beyond the major cities, and even there the...freedom fighters often hold sway by night and sometimes even by day."

Sympathetic as they may be, the rebels are badly overwhelmed by the firepower of the occupying superpower and are especially at risk in their daring raids because the enemy is "able to operate with virtual impunity in the air." The superpower's soldiers are sent out from their bases and the capital to "make sweeps, but chiefly to search and destroy, not to clear and hold." Its soldiers, known for their ma.s.sive human rights abuses and the cruelty of their atrocities, have in some cases been reported to press "on the throats of prisoners to force them to open their mouths while the guards urinate into them, [as well as] setting police dogs on detainees, raping women in front of family members and other vile acts."

On their part, the "guerrillas," armed largely with Russian and Chinese rifles and rocket propelled grenade launchers, have responded with the warfare of the weak. They have formed car-bombing squads and use a variety of cleverly constructed wheelbarrow, bicycle, suitcase, and roadside bombs as well as suicide operations performed by volunteers chosen from among the foreign jihadists. They engage in a.s.sa.s.sinations of, for example, university intellectuals and other sabotage activities in the capital and elsewhere aimed at killing the occupying troops and their sympathizers. They behead hostages to instill fear in the other side. Funding for the resistance comes, in part, from supporters in sympathetic Islamic countries, including Saudi Arabia. However, "if the mujaheddin are ever to realize their goal of forcing [the occupiers] out, they will need more than better arms and training, more than their common faith. They will need to develop a genuinely unified resistance.... Above all, the a.n.a.lysts say, they will need to make the war...even costlier and more difficult for the [occupiers] than it is now."

It's easy enough to identify this composite description, right? Our recent wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, as portrayed perhaps in the Arab press and on Arab websites. As it happens, actually not. With the exception of the material on bombs, which comes from Steve Coll's book Ghost Wars, and on the beheading of hostages, which comes from an Amnesty International report, all of the above is taken from either the statements of U.S. officials or coverage in either the Washington Post or the New York Times of the Afghan anti-Soviet jihad of the 1980s, fostered, armed, and funded to the tune of billions of dollars by the Central Intelligence Agency with the help of the Saudi and Pakistani intelligence services.

Well, then try this one:Thousands of troops of the occupying power make a second, carefully planned "brutal advance" into a large city to root out Islamic "rebels." The first attack on the city failed, though it all but destroyed neighborhoods in a "ferocious bombardment." The soldiers advance behind "relentless air and artillery strikes." This second attempt to take the city, the capital of a "rebellious province," defended by a determined "rebel force" of perhaps five hundred to three thousand, succeeds, though the fighting never quite ends. The result? A "razed" city, "where virtually every building has been bombed, burned, sh.e.l.led beyond recognition or simply obliterated by war"; a place where occupying "soldiers fire at anything that moves" and their checkpoints are surrounded by "endless ruins of former homes and gutted, upended automobiles." The city has been reduced to "rubble" and, for the survivors, "rebel" fighters and civilians alike, it and surrounding areas are now a "killing field." The city lacks electricity, water, or much in the way of food, and yet the rebels hold out in its ruins, and though amus.e.m.e.nts are few, "on one occasion, a...singer came and gave an impromptu guitar concert of patriotic and folk tunes [for them]."

In the carnage involved in the taking of the city, the resistance showed great fort.i.tude. "'See you in paradise,' [one] volunteer said. 'G.o.d is great.'" Hair-raising news reports from the occupied city and from refugee camps describe the "traumatized" and maimed. ("Here in the remains of Hospital Number Nine-[the city's] only hospital with electricity-she sees a ceaseless stream of mangled bodies, victims of gunfire and sh.e.l.lings"); press reports also acknowledge the distance between official promises of reconstruction and life in the gutted but still resistant city, suggesting "the contrast between the symbolic peace and security declared by [occupation] officials and the city's mine-ridden, bullet-flying reality." Headlines don't hesitate to highlight claims made by those who fled and survived-"Refugees Describe Atrocities by Occupation Troops"-and reports bluntly use the label given the acts of the occupiers by human rights organizations-"war crimes." Such organizations are quoted to devastating effect on the subject. The rebels may be called "bandits" by the occupiers, but it's clear in news reports that they are the ones to be admired.

No question of the sources here at least. Obviously the above is a composite account of the 2004 American a.s.sault on the Sunni city of Falluja taken from Arab press reports or sympathetic Arab websites. As it happens, if you believed that, you'd be zero for two. In fact, all of the above is taken from contemporary accounts of the January 2000 Russian a.s.sault on Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, that appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, or the Boston Globe.

How to Spot a Terrorist.

I put together these descriptions from American reports on the Afghan anti-Soviet jihad of the 1980s, written in the midst of the Cold War, and on the second battle for Grozny ten years after the Cold War ended, because both seemed to have certain eerie similarities to events in Iraq after Baghdad fell to American troops in March 2003, though obviously neither presents an exact a.n.a.logy. Both earlier moments of reportage do, however, highlight certain limitations in our press coverage of the war in Iraq (and also Afghanistan).

After all, in the case of Afghanistan in the 1980s, there was also a fractured and fractious rebellion against an invading imperial superpower intent on controlling the country and setting up its own regime in the capital. The anti-Soviet rebellion was (like the present one in Iraq) conducted in part by Islamic rebels, many of whom were extremist Sunni jihadists (and some of whose names, from Osama bin Laden to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, remain significant today). The Afghan guerrilla war was backed by that other superpower, the United States, for a decade through its spy agency, the CIA, which promoted methods that, in the Iraq context, would be called "terrorism."

In the case of the Russian a.s.sault on Grozny, the capital of the breakaway region of Chechnya, you also have an imperial power, if no longer exactly a superpower, intent on wresting a city-and a "safe haven"-from a fractious, largely Islamist insurgency and ready to make an example of a major city to do so. The Russian rubblizing of Grozny may have been more extreme than the American destruction of Falluja (or so it seems), but the events remain comparable. In the case of Grozny, the U.S. government did not actively back the rebels as they had in Afghanistan, but the Bush administration, made up of former Cold Warriors who had imbibed the idea of "rolling back" the Soviet Union in their younger years, was certainly sympathetic to the rebels.

What, then, are some of the key differences I noticed in reading through examples of this reportage and comparing it to the products of our present embedded state? Let me list four differences-and suggest a question: To what degree are American reporters as a group destined to follow, with only modest variation, the paths opened for them by our government's positions on its wars of choice?

Language: Those in rebellion in Iraq today are, according to our military, "anti-Iraqi forces" (a phrase that, in quotes, often makes it into news pieces and is just about never commented upon by reporters). Other terms, most of them also first issuing from the mouths of U.S. officials, have been "dead-enders," "bitter enders," "Baathist remnants," "terrorists," and most regularly (and neutrally), "insurgents" who are fighting in an "insurgency"-but rarely "guerrillas."

The Afghans in the 1980s, on the other hand, were almost invariably in "rebellion" and so "rebels" as headlines at the time made clear ("Officials Say U.S. Plans to Double Supply of Arms to Afghan Rebels," New York Times). They were part of a "resistance movement" and as their representatives could write op-eds for our papers, the Washington Post, for instance, had no hesitation about headlining Matthew D. Erulkar's op-ed of January 13, 1987, "Why America Should Recognize the Afghan Resistance" or identifying its author as working "for the Afghan resistance."

But the phrase "Afghan resistance" or "the resistance" was no less likely to appear in news pieces, as in an October 22, 1983, report by Post reporter William Branigin, "Feuding Guerrilla Groups Rely on Uneasy Pakistan." Nor, as in James Rupert's "Dreams of Martyrdom Draw Islamic Arabs to Join Afghan Rebels" (Washington Post, July 21, 1986), was there any problem calling an Islamic "fundamentalist party" that was part of the "Afghan Jihad" a "resistance party." President Ronald Reagan at the time regularly referred to fundamentalist Afghans and their Arab supporters as "freedom fighters" (while the CIA, through the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence service, shuttled vast sums of money and stores of weaponry to the most extreme of the Afghan jihadist parties). "Freedom fighter" was commonly used in the press, sometimes interchangeably with "the Afghan resistance," as in a March 12, 1981, piece by Post columnist Joseph Kraft, "The Afghan Chaos" ("Six different organizations claiming to represent Afghan freedom fighters").

Similarly, the Chechens in Grozny in 2000 were normally referred to in U.S. news accounts as "rebels": "separatist rebels," "rebel ambushes," "a rebel counterattack," and so on. ("Rebel," as anyone knows who remembers American rock 'n' roll or movies of the 1950s and 1960s, is a positive term in our lexicon.) Official Russian terms for the Chechen rebels, who were fighting grimly like any group of outgunned urban guerrillas in a manner similar to the Sunni guerrillas in Iraq today-"bandits" or "armed criminals in camouflage and masks"-were quoted, but then (as "anti-Iraqi forces" and other Bush administration terms are not) put in context or contrasted with Chechen versions of reality.

In a typical piece from CNN, you could find the following quote: "'The [Russians] aren't killing any bandits,' one refugee said after reaching Ingushetia. 'They're killing old men, women and children. And they keep on bombing-day and night.'" In a Daniel Williams piece in the Washington Post, the Russian government's announcements about the fighting in Grozny have become a "daily chant," a phrase that certainly suggests how the reporter feels about their accuracy.

Here's a quote from a discussion in a Washington Post editorial of an a.s.sociated Press photo of the destruction in Grozny. The photo was described elsewhere as "a pastel from h.e.l.l" and was evidently of a sort we've seen far too little of in our press from either Falluja or the Old City of Najaf:Russian leaders announced with pride Sunday that their armed forces had captured Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, five months into their war to subdue that rebellious province. Reports from the battle zone suggested that the Russians had not so much liberated the city as destroyed it.... Grozny resembles nothing so much as Stalingrad, reduced to rubble by Hitler's troops before the Red Army inflicted a key defeat that Russian schoolchildren still celebrate.... All in all, this is not likely to be a victory that Russian schoolchildren will celebrate generations hence.

Similar writing certainly certainly wasn't found on American editorial pages when it came to the "razing" of Falluja, nor were those strong adjectives like "brutal," once wielded in the Grozny accounts, much to be found either.

Testimony: Perhaps the most striking difference between news stories about the Afghan revolt, the destruction of Grozny, and the destruction of Falluja may be that in the cases of the first two, American reporters were willing, even eager, to seek out refugee accounts, even if the refugees were supporters of the rebels or rebels themselves. Such testimony was, for instance, regularly offered as evidence of what was happening in Grozny and more generally in Chechnya (even when the accounts couldn't necessarily be individually confirmed). So the Post's Daniel Williams, for instance, in "Brutal Retreat from Grozny Led to a Killing Field" (February 12, 2000) begins by following Heda Yusupova, mother of two "and a cook for a group of Chechen rebels" as she flees the city: "[She] froze in her tracks when she heard the first land mine explode. It was night, and she and a long file of rebels were making a dangerous retreat from Grozny, the Chechen capital, during the final hours of a brutal Russian advance. Another explosion. Her children, ages 9 and 10, screamed." It's a piece that certainly puts the Russian a.s.sault on Grozny in a striking perspective.

Post reporter Sharon LaFraniere wrote a piece on June 29, 2000, bluntly ent.i.tled "Chechen Refugees Describe Atrocities by Russian Troops," in which she reported on "atrocities" in what the Russians labeled a "pro-bandit village": "'I have never imagined such tortures, such cruelty,' [the villager] said, sitting at a small table in the dim room that has housed her family here for nearly three years. 'There were a lot of men who were left only half alive.'" And when Russian operations against individual Chechens were described, it was possible to see them through Chechen eyes: "Three times last month, Algayeva said, Russian soldiers broke in, threatening to shoot the school's guard. They smashed doors, locks and desks. The last time, May 20, they took sugar, plates and a bra.s.s bell that was rung at school ceremonies."

As in a February 29, 2000, Boston Globe piece ("Chechen Horror"), it was also possible for newspapers to discuss editorially both "the suffering of the Chechens" and the way "the United States and the rest of the international community can no longer ignore their humanitarian obligation to alleviate-and end-[that suffering]."

The equivalent pieces for Iraq are largely missing, though every now and then-as with an Edward Wong piece in the New York Times on life in resistant Sadr City, Baghdad's huge Shiite slum-there have been exceptions. Given the dangers Western reporters face in Iraq and the constricting system of "embedding" that generally prevails, when you read of Americans breaking into Iraqi homes, you're ordinarily going to see the event from the point of view of the troops. Iraqi refugees have not been much valued in our press for their testimony. (There is a deep irony in this, since the Bush administration launched its war citing mainly exile-that is, refugee-testimony.) We know, of course, that it's difficult for U.S. reporters to go in search of such testimony in Iraq, but not impossible. For instance, Dahr Jamail, a determined freelance journalist, managed to interview refugees from Falluja, and their testimony sounds remarkably like the Grozny testimony from major American newspapers in 2000: "The American warplanes came continuously through the night and bombed everywhere in Fallujah! It did not stop even for a moment! If the American forces did not find a target to bomb, they used sound bombs just to terrorize the people and children. The city stayed in fear; I cannot give a picture of how panicked everyone was."

For the "suffering of the Iraqis," you had to turn to the periodic "testimony" of Iraqi bloggers like the pseudonymous Riverbend of Baghdad Burning or perhaps Al Jazeera. The suffering we actually hear most about in our press is American suffering, in part because it's the American troops with whom our reporters are embedded, with whom they bond, and fighters on battlefields anywhere almost invariably find themselves in grim and suffering circ.u.mstances.

Human rights evidence: The reports from Grozny in particular often made extensive use of the investigations of human rights groups of various sorts (including Russian ones), and reporters then were willing to put the acts of the Russians in Grozny (as in Afghanistan) in the context of "war crimes," as indeed they were. In Iraq, on the other hand, while pieces on human rights reports about our occupation can sometimes be found deep in our papers, the evidence supplied by human rights groups is seldom deployed by American reporters as an evidentiary part of war pieces.

"Terrorism": Finally, it's interesting to see how, in different reporting contexts and different moments, the term "terrorism" is or is not brought to bear. In Grozny, for instance, the "rebels" used "radio controlled land mines" and a.s.sa.s.sinated Chechens who worked for the Russians (just as Iraqi insurgents and terrorists explode roadside IEDs and a.s.sa.s.sinate those who work for the Americans) and yet the Chechens remained "rebels."

On this topic, though, Afghanistan in the 1980s is of special interest. There, as Steve Coll tells us in his riveting book Ghost Wars, the CIA organized terror on a major scale in conjunction with the Pakistani ISI, which trained "freedom fighters" in how to mount car-bomb and even camel-bomb attacks on Soviet officers and soldiers in Russian-occupied cities (techniques personally "endorsed," according to Coll, by CIA director William Casey). The CIA also supplied the Afghan rebels with long-range sniper rifles (meant for a.s.sa.s.sinations) and delayed-timing devices for plastic explosives. "The rebels fashioned b.o.o.by-trapped bombs from gooey black contact explosives, supplied to Pakistani intelligence by the CIA, that could be molded into ordinary shapes or poured into innocent utensils." Kabul cinemas and cultural shows were bombed, and suicide operations mounted using Arab jihadis. "Many tons of C-4 plastic explosives for sabotage operations" were shipped in, and the CIA took to supplying so-called dual-use weapons systems that could be used against military targets, "but also in terror attacks and a.s.sa.s.sinations." Much of this was known, at least to some degree at the time (and some of it reported in press accounts), and yet the Afghans remained "freedom fighters" and a resistance movement, even after the Afghan jihad began to slip across the other Pakistani border into Indian Kashmir.

What changed? What made such people, according to our press, "terrorists"? The answer is, of course, that we became their prime enemy and target. Coll offers this observation:Ten years later the vast training infrastructure that [the Pakistani ISI] built with the enormous budgets endorsed by NSDD-166 [the official American plan for the Afghan jihad]-the specialized camps, the sabotage training manuals, the electronic bomb detonators, and so on-would be referred to routinely in America as "terrorist infrastructure."

At the time of its construction, however, it served a jihadist army that operated openly on the battlefield, attempted to seize and hold territory, and exercised sovereignty over civilian populations -in Soviet Afghanistan, that is.

In the Afghan anti-Soviet war, the CIA looked favorably indeed upon the recruitment of thousands of Arab jihadists and eagerly supported a particularly unsavory and murderous Afghan extremist warlord, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who refused at the time to travel to Washington and shake the hand of our "infidel" president, Ronald Reagan. (Today, Hekmatyar fights U.S. troops in Afghanistan.) As it turned out, the "freedom fighters" fell on each other's throats even as Kabul was being taken, and then, within years, some of them turned on their former American patrons with murderous intent. No figure tells the story better, I think, than this one: "In 1971 there had been only nine hundred madra.s.sas [Islamic schools] in all of Pakistan. By the summer of 1988 there were about 8,000 official religious schools and an estimated 25,000 unregistered ones, many of them cl.u.s.tered along the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier and funded by wealthy patrons from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states."

The Russians in Afghanistan and Chechnya were indeed brutes and committed war crimes of almost every imaginable sort. The language of the American press, watching the invading army of a former superpower turn the capital city of a small border state into utter rubble, was appropriate indeed, given what was going on. In both Afghanistan and in Iraq, on the other hand, where the American government is actively involved, reporters generally-and yes, there are always exceptions-have followed the government's lead with the terminology-"freedom fighter" versus "terrorist"-falling into place as befit the moment, even though many of the acts being described remained the same.

The press is always seen as a weapon of war by officials, and so it has been seen by the Pentagon and official Washington. Reporters and editors obviously feel that and the pressures that flow from it in all sorts of complex ways. Whether consciously or not, it's striking how such perceptions shade and limit even individual stories, alter small language choices, and the nature of what pa.s.ses for evidence as well as news.

The Imperial Unconscious.

Sometimes, it's the everyday things, the ones that fly below the radar, that matter.

Here is an excerpt from a news story about Secretary of Defense Robert Gates's testimony on the Afghan War before the Senate Armed Services Committee in January 2009: "U.S. goals in Afghanistan must be 'modest, realistic,' and 'above all, there must be an Afghan face on this war,' Gates said. 'The Afghan people must believe this is their war and we are there to help them. If they think we are there for our own purposes, then we will go the way of every other foreign army that has been in Afghanistan.'"

Now, in our world, a statement like this seems so obvious, so reasonable as to be beyond comment. And yet, stop a moment and think about this part of it: "there must be an Afghan face on this war." U.S. military and civilian officials used an equivalent phrase in 2005 and 2006, when things were going really wrong in Iraq. It was then commonplace-and no less unremarked upon-for them to urgently suggest that an "Iraqi face" be put on events there.

The phrase is revelatory-and oddly blunt. As an image, there's really only one way to understand it (not that anyone here stops to do so). After all, what does it mean to "put a face" on something that a.s.sumedly already has a face? In this case, it has to mean putting an Afghan mask over what we know to be the actual "face" of the Afghan War-ours-a foreign face that men like Gates recognize, quite correctly, is not the one most Afghans want to see. It's hardly surprising that the secretary of defense would pick up such a phrase, part of Washington's everyday a.r.s.enal of words and images when it comes to geopolitics, power, and war. And yet, make no mistake, this is Empire-speak, American-style. It's the language (behind which lies a deeper structure of argument and thought) that is essential to Washington's vision of itself as a planet-straddling Goliath. It is part of the flotsam and jetsam that regularly bubbles up from the American imperial unconscious.

Of course, words create realities even though such language, in all its strangeness, essentially pa.s.ses unnoticed here. Largely uncommented upon, it helps normalize American practices in the world, comfortably shielding us from certain global realities. It also has the potential to blind us to those realities, which can be dangerous indeed. So let's consider just a few entries in what might be thought of as The Dictionary of American Empire-Speak.

War hidden in plain sight: There has recently been much reporting on, and even some debate about, the efficacy of the Obama administration's decision to increase the intensity of CIA missile attacks from drone aircraft in what Washington, in a newly coined neologism reflecting a widening war, calls "Af-Pak"-the Pashtun tribal borderlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan. The pace of such attacks has risen since Barack Obama entered the Oval Office, as have casualties from the missile strikes, as well as popular outrage in Pakistan over the attacks.

Thanks to Senator Dianne Feinstein, we also know that, despite strong official Pakistani government protests, someone official in that country is doing more than looking the other way while they occur. As the senator revealed, at least some of the CIA's unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) cruising the skies over Af-Pak are evidently stationed at Pakistani bases. We also learned that American special operations units are now regularly making forays inside Pakistan "primarily to gather intelligence"; that a unit of seventy American Special Forces advisers, a "secret task force, overseen by the United States Central Command and Special Operations Command," is aiding and training Pakistani Army and Frontier Corps paramilitary troops, again inside Pakistan; and that, despite (or perhaps, in part, because of) these American efforts, the influence of the Pakistani Taliban is actually expanding, even as Pakistan threatens to melt down.

Mystifyingly enough, however, this Pakistani part of the American war in Afghanistan is still referred to in major U.S. papers as a "covert war." As news about it pours out, who it's being hidden from is one of those questions no one bothers to ask.

On February 20, 2009, Mark Mazzetti and David E. Sanger of the New York Times typically wrote: "With two missile strikes over the past week, the Obama administration has expanded the covert war run by the Central Intelligence Agency inside Pakistan, attacking a militant network seeking to topple the Pakistani government.... Under standard policy for covert operations, the C.I.A. strikes inside Pakistan have not been publicly acknowledged either by the Obama administration or the Bush administration."

On February 25, 2009, Mazzetti and Helene Cooper reported that new CIA head Leon Panetta essentially bragged to reporters that "the agency's campaign against militants in Pakistan's tribal areas was the 'most effective weapon' the Obama administration had to combat Al Qaeda's top leadership. ... Mr. Panetta stopped short of directly acknowledging the missile strikes, but he said that 'operational efforts' focusing on Qaeda leaders had been successful." Siobhan Gorman of the Wall Street Journal reported the next day that Panetta said the attacks are "probably the most effective weapon we have to try to disrupt al Qaeda right now." She added, "Mr. Obama and National Security Adviser James Jones have strongly endorsed their use, [Panetta] said."

"Covert" war? These "operational efforts" have been front-page news in the Pakistani press for months, they were part of the U.S. presidential campaign debates, and they certainly can't be a secret for the Pashtuns in those border areas who must see drone aircraft overhead relatively regularly, or experience the missiles arriving in their neighborhoods.

In the United States, "covert war" has long been a term for wars that were openly discussed, debated, and often lauded in this country, such as the U.S.-backed Contra War against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in the 1980s. To a large extent, when aspects of these wars have actually been "covert"-that is, purposely hidden from anyone-it has been from the U.S. public, not the targets of our intervention. Such language, however threadbare, may also offer official Washington a kind of "plausible deniability" when it comes to thinking about what kind of an "American face" we present to the world.

Imperial naming practices: In our press, anonymous U.S. officials routinely point with pride to the increasing "precision" and "accuracy" of drone missile attacks in taking out Taliban or al-Qaeda figures without (supposedly) taking out the tribespeople who live in the same villages or neighboring compounds. Such pieces lend our air war an almost sterile quality. They tend to emphasize the extraordinary lengths to which planners go to avoid "collateral damage." To many Americans, it must then seem strange, even irrational, that perfectly non-fundamentalist Pakistanis should be so outraged about attacks aimed at the world's worst terrorists.

On the other hand, consider for a moment the names of those drones now regularly in the skies over "Pashtunistan." These are no less regularly published in our press to no comment at all. The most basic of the armed drones goes by the name of Predator, a moniker that might as well have come directly from those nightmarish sci-fi movies about an alien that feasts on humans. Undoubtedly, however, it was used in the way Colonel Michael Steele of the 101st Airborne Division meant it when he exhorted his brigade deploying to Iraq (according to Thomas E. Ricks' book The Gamble) to remember: "You're the predator."

The Predator drone is armed with two missiles. The more advanced drone, originally called the Predator B, now being deployed to the skies over Af-Pak, has been dubbed the Reaper-as in the Grim Reaper. Now, there's only one thing such a "hunter-killer UAV" could be reaping, and you know just what that is: lives. It can be armed with up to fourteen missiles (or four missiles and two 500-pound bombs), which means it packs quite a deadly wallop. Those missiles are named as well. They're h.e.l.lfire missiles. So, if you want to consider the nature of this covert war in terms of names alone: Predators and Reapers are bringing down the fire from some satanic h.e.l.l upon the peasants, fundamentalist guerrillas, and terrorists of the Af-Pak border regions.

In Washington, when the Af-Pak war is discussed, it's in the bloodless, bureaucratic language of "global counterinsurgency" or "irregular warfare," of "soft power," "hard power," and "smart power." But flying over the Pashtun wildlands is the blunt-edged face of predation and death, ready at a moment's notice to deliver h.e.l.lfire to those below.

Imperial arguments: Faced with rising numbers of civilian casualties from U.S. and NATO air strikes in Afghanistan and an increasingly outraged Afghan public, American officials tend to place the blame for most skyborne "collateral damage" squarely on the Taliban. As Joint Chiefs Chairman Michael Mullen bluntly explained, "[T]he enemy hides behind civilians." Hence, so this Empire-speak argument goes, dead civilians are actually the Taliban's doing.

U.S. military and civilian spokespeople have long accused Taliban guerrillas of using civilians as "shields," or even of purposely luring devastating air strikes down on Afghan wedding parties to create civilian casualties and inflame the sensibilities of rural Afghans. This commonplace argument has two key features: a claim that they made us do it (kill civilians) and the implication that the Taliban fighters "hiding" among innocent villagers or wedding revelers are so many cowards, willing to put their fellow Pashtuns at risk rather than come out and fight like men-and, of course, given the firepower arrayed against them, die.

The U.S. media regularly records this argument without reflecting on it. In this country, in fact, the evil of combatants "hiding" among civilians seems so self-evident, especially given the larger evil of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, that no one thinks twice about it. And yet like so much of Empire-speak, this argument is distinctly unidirectional. What's good for the guerrilla goose, so to speak, is inapplicable to the imperial gander. To ill.u.s.trate, consider the American "pilots" flying those unmanned Predators and Reapers. We don't know exactly where all of them are (other than not in the drones), but some are certainly at Nellis Air Force Base just outside Las Vegas.

In other words, were the Taliban guerrillas to leave the protection of those civilians and come out into the open, there would be no enemy to fight in the usual sense, not even a predatory one. The pilot firing that h.e.l.lfire missile into some Pakistani border village or compound is, after all, using the UAV's cameras, including by next year a new system hairraisingly dubbed "Gorgon Stare," to locate his target and then, via console, as in a single-shooter video game, firing the missile, possibly from many thousands of miles away.

And yet nowhere in our world will you find anyone making the argument that those pilots are in "hiding" like so many cowards. Such a thought seems absurd to us, as it would if it were applied to the F-18 pilots taking off from aircraft carriers near the Afghan coast or the B-1 pilots flying out of unnamed Middle Eastern bases or the Indian Ocean island base of Diego Garcia. And yet, whatever those pilots may do in Afghan skies, unless they experience a mechanical malfunction, they are in no more danger than if they, too, were somewhere outside Las Vegas. In the last seven years, some helicopters, but no planes, have gone down in Afghanistan.

When the Afghan mujahedeen fought the Soviets in the 1980s, the CIA supplied them with handheld Stinger missiles, and they did indeed start knocking Soviet helicopters and planes out of the skies (which proved the beginning of the end for the Russians). The Afghan or Pakistani Taliban or al-Qaeda terrorists have no such capability today, which means, if you think about it, that what we here imagine as an "air war" involves none of the dangers we would normally a.s.sociate with war. Looked at in another light, those missile strikes and bombings are really one-way acts of slaughter.

The Taliban's tactics are, of course, the essence of guerrilla warfare, which always involves an asymmetrical battle against more powerful armies and weaponry, and which, if successful, always depends on the ability of the guerrilla to blend into the environment, natural and human, or, as Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong so famously put it, to "swim" in the "sea of the people." If you imagine your enemy simply using the villagers of Afghanistan as "shields" or "hiding" like so many cowards among them, you are speaking the language of imperial power but also blinding yourself (or the American public) to the actual realities of the war you're fighting.

Imperial thought: To justify those missile attacks in Pakistan, U.S. officials have been leaking details on the program's "successes" to reporters. Anonymous officials have offered the "possibly wishful estimate" that the CIA "covert war" has led to the deaths (or capture) of eleven of al-Qaeda's top twenty commanders, including, according to a Wall Street Journal report, "Abu Layth al-Libi, whom U.S. officials described as 'a rising star' in the group." "Rising star" is such an American phrase, melding as it does imagined terror hierarchies with the lingo of celebrity tabloids. In fact, one problem with Empire-speak, and imperial thought more generally, is the way it prevents imperial officials from imagining a world not in their own image. So it's not surprising that, despite their best efforts, they regularly conjure up their enemies as a warped version of themselves-hierarchical, overly reliant on leaders, and top heavy.

In the Vietnam era, U.S. officials spent a remarkable amount of effort sending troops to search for, and planes to bomb, the border sanctuaries of Cambodia and Laos on a fruitless hunt for COSVN (the so-called Central Office for South Vietnam), the supposed nerve center of the communist enemy, aka "the bamboo Pentagon." Of course, it wasn't there to be found. It only existed in Washington's imperial imagination. In the Af-Pak "theater," we may be seeing a similar phenomenon. Underpinning the CIA killer-drone program is a belief that the key to combating al-Qaeda (and possibly the Taliban) is destroying its leadership one by one. As key Pakistani officials have tried to explain, the missile attacks, which have indeed killed some al-Qaeda and Pakistani Taliban figures, as well as whoever was in their vicinity, are distinctly counterproductive. The deaths of those figures in no way compensate for the outrage, the destabilization, the radicalization that the attacks engender in the region. They may, in fact, be functionally strengthening each of those movements.

What is hard for Washington to grasp is this: "Decapitation," to use another American imperial term, is not a particularly effective strategy with a decentralized guerrilla or terror organization. The fact is a headless guerrilla movement is nowhere near as brainless or helpless as a headless Washington would be.

Imperial dreams and nightmares: Americans have rarely liked to think of themselves as "imperial," so what is it about Rome in these last years? First, the neocons, in the flush of seeming victory in 2002 and 2003, began to imagine the United States as a "new Rome" (or new British Empire). As Charles Krauthammer wrote as early as February 2001 in Time, "America is no mere international citizen. It is the dominant power in the world, more dominant than any since Rome."

All roads on this planet, they were then convinced, led ineluctably to Washington. Now, of course, they visibly don't, and the imperial bragging about surpa.s.sing the Roman or British empires has long since faded away. When it comes to the Afghan War, in fact, those (resupply) "roads" seem to lead, embarra.s.singly enough, through Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Russia, and Iran. But the comparison to conquering Rome evidently remains on the brain.

When, for instance, Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post, drumming up support for the revised, age-of-Obama mission in Afghanistan, he just couldn't help starting off with an inspiring tale about the Romans and a small Italian city-state, Locri, that they conquered. As he told it, the ruler the Romans installed in Locri, a rapacious fellow named Pleminius, proved a looter and a tyrant. And yet, Mullen a.s.sured us, the Locrians so believed in "the reputation for equanimity and fairness that Rome had built" that they sent a delegation to the Roman Senate, knowing they could get a hearing, and demanded rest.i.tution. And indeed, the tyrant was removed. Admittedly, this may seem like a far-fetched a.n.a.logy for the United States in Afghanistan (and don't for a second mix up Pleminius, that rogue, with Afghan president Hamid Karzai, even though the Obama-ites have come to consider him corrupt and replaceable). Still, as Mullen saw it, the point was: "We don't always get it right. But like the early Romans, we strive in the end to make it right. We strive to earn trust. And that makes all the difference." Mullen is, it seems, the Aesop of the joint chiefs of staff and, in his somewhat overheated brain, we evidently remain the conquering (but just) "early" Romans-before, of course, the fatal rot set in.

And then there's the Washington Post's Thomas Ricks. Reflecting on Iraq, where he believes we could still be fighting in 2015, Ricks writes:In October 2008, as I was finishing my latest book on the Iraq war, I visited the Roman Forum during a stop in Italy. I sat on a stone wall on the south side of the Capitoline Hill and studied the two triumphal arches at either end of the Forum, both commemorating Roman wars in the Middle East....

...The structures brought home a sad realization: It's simply unrealistic to believe that the U.S. military will be able to pull out of the Middle East.

It was a week when U.S. forces had engaged in combat in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan-a string of countries stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean-following in the footsteps of Alexander the Great, the Romans and the British.

With the waning of British power, Ricks continued, it "has been the United States' turn to take the lead there." And our turn, as it happens, just isn't over yet. Evidently that, at least, is the view from our imperial capital and from our military viceroys out on the peripheries.

Honestly, Freud would have loved these guys. They seem to channel the imperial unconscious. Take CentCom commander General David Petraeus. For him, too, the duties and dangers of empire evidently weigh heavily on the brain. Like a number of key figures, civilian and military, he has begun to issue warnings about Afghanistan's dangers. As the Washington Post reported, "[Petraeus] suggested that the odds of success were low, given that foreign military powers have historically met with defeat in Afghanistan. 'Afghanistan has been known over the years as the graveyard of empires,' he said. 'We cannot take that history lightly.'"

Of course, he's worrying about the graveyard aspect of this, but what I find curious-exactly because no one thinks it odd enough to comment on here-is the functional admission in the use of this old adage about Afghanistan that we fall into the category of empires, whether or not in search of a graveyard in which to die. And he's not alone in this. Secretary of Defense Gates put the matter similarly, according to Bloomberg News: "Without the support of the Afghan people, Gates said, the U.S. would simply 'go the way of every other foreign army that's ever been in Afghanistan.'"

Imperial blindness: Think of the above as just a few prospective entries in The Dictionary of American Empire-Speak that will, of course, never be compiled. We're so used to such language, so inured to it and to the thinking behind it, so used, in fact, to living on a one-way planet in which all roads lead to and from Washington, that it doesn't seem like a language at all. It's just part of the unexamined warp and woof of everyday life in a country that still believes it normal to garrison the planet, regularly fight wars halfway across the globe, and produce military manuals on counterinsurgency warfare the way a do-it-yourself furniture maker would produce instructions for constructing a cabinet from a kit. We don't find it strange to have seventeen intelligence agencies, some devoted to listening in on, and spying on, the planet, or capable of running "covert wars" in tribal borderlands thousands of miles distant, or of flying unmanned drones over those same borderlands destroying those who come into camera view. We're inured to the bizarreness of it all and of the language and pretensions that go with it.

If The Dictionary of American Empire-Speak were ever produced, who here would buy it? Who would feel the need to check out what seems like the only reasonable and self-evident language for describing the world? How else, after all, would we operate? How else would any American in a position of authority talk in Washington or Baghdad or Islamabad or Rome?

So it undoubtedly seemed to the Romans, too. And we know what finally happened to their empire and the language that went with it. Such a language plays its role in normalizing the running of an empire. It allows officials (and in our case the media as well) not to see what would be inconvenient to the smooth functioning of such an enormous undertaking. In the good times, its uses are obvious. On the other hand, when the normal ways of empire cease to function well, that same language can suddenly blind the imperial custodians-which is, after all, what the foreign policy "team" of the Obama era is-to necessary realities. At a moment when it might be important to grasp what the "American face" in the mirror actually looks like, they can't see it, and sometimes what you can't bring yourself to see can hurt you.

Fixing What's Wrong in Washington... in Afghanistan.

Explain something to me.

In the first months of 2010, unless you were insensate, you couldn't help running across someone talking, writing, speaking, or pontificating about how busted government is in the United States. State governments are increasingly broke and getting broker. The federal government, while running up the red ink, is, as just about everyone declares, "paralyzed" and so incapable of acting intelligently on just about anything.

No less a personage than Vice President Biden a.s.sured the co-anchor of the CBS Early Show, "Washington, right now, is broken." Indiana senator Evan Bayh used the very same word, broken, when he announced that he would not run for reelection and, in response to his decision, Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz typically commented, "The system has been largely dysfunctional for nearly two decades, and everybody knows it." Voters seem to agree. Two words, "polarization" and "gridlock"-or hyperbolic cousins like "paralyzing hyperpartisanship"-dominated the news when the media described that dysfunctionalism. Foreign observers were similarly struck, hence a spate of pieces like the one in the British magazine the Economist headlined, "America's Democracy, a Study in Paralysis."

Washington's incapacity to govern now evidently seems to ever more Americans at the root of many looming problems. As the New York Times summed up one of them in a recent headline: "Party Gridlock in Washington Feeds Fear of a Debt Crisis." When President Obama leaves the confines of Washington for the campaign trail, he promptly attacks congressional "gridlock" and the "slash and burn politics" that have left the nation's capital tied in knots.

The Republicans, who ran us into this ditch in the Bush years, are now perfectly happy to be the party of "no"-and polls seem to indicate that it may be a fruitful strategy for the 2010 election. Meanwhile, special interests rule Washington and lobbying is king. As if to catch the spirit of this new reality, the president recently offered his vote of support to the sort of Wall Street CEOs who took Americans to the cleaners in the great economic meltdown of 2008 and are once again raking in the millions, while few have faith that change or improvement of any kind is in our future. Good governance, in other words, no longer seems part of the American tool kit and way of life.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, to the tune of billions of taxpayer dollars, the U.S. military is promoting "good governance" with all its might. In a major campaign in the modest-sized city of Marja (a place next to no one had heard of) in Taliban-controlled Helmand Province, Afghanistan, it placed a bet on its ability to "restore the credibility" of President Hamid Karzai's government. In the process, it announced plans to unfurl a functioning city administration where none existed. According to its commanding general, Stanley McChrystal, as soon as the U.S. Army and the marines, along with British troops and Afghan forces, drove the Taliban out of town, he was prepared to roll out an Afghan "government in a box," including police, courts, and local services.

The U.S. military was intent, according to the Wall Street Journal, on "delivering a new administration and millions of dollars in aid to a place where government employees didn't dare set foot a week ago." Slated to be the future "mayor" of Marja, Haji Zahir, a businessman who spent fifteen years in Germany, was, according to press reports, living on a U.S. Marine base in the province until, one day soon, the American military could install him in an "abandoned government building" or simple "a clump of ruins" in that city.

He was, we were told, to arrive with four U.S. civilian advisers, two from the State Department and two from the U.S. Agency for International Development, described (in the typically patronizing language of American press reports) as his "mentors." They were to help him govern, and especially dole out the millions of dollars that the U.S. military has available to "reconstruct" Marja. Road-building projects were to be launched, schools refurbished, and a new clinic built, all to win Pashtun "hearts and minds." As soon as the fighting abated, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs suggested, the post-military emphasis would be on "economic development," with an influx of "military and civilian workers" who would "show a better way of life" to the town's inhabitants.

So explain something to me: Why does the military of a country convinced it's becoming ungovernable think itself so capable of making another ungovernable country governable? What's the military's skill set here? What lore, what body of political knowledge, are they drawing on? Who do they think they represent, the Philadelphia of 1776 or the Washington of 2010, and if the latter, why should Americans be considered the globe's leading experts in good government anymore? And while we're at it, fill me in on one other thing: Just what has convinced American officials in Afghanistan and the nation's capital that they have the special ability to teach, prod, wheedle, bribe, or force Afghans to embark on good governance in their country if we can't do it in Washington or Sacramento?

Explain something else to me: Why are our military and civilian leaders so confident that, after nine years of occupying the world's leading narco-state, nine years of reconstruction boondoggles and military failure, they suddenly have the key, the formula, to solve the Afghan mess? Why do leading officials suddenly believe they can make Afghan president Hamid Karzai into "a Winston Churchill who can rally his people," as one unnamed official told Matthew Rosenberg and Peter Spiegel of the Wall Street Journal-and all of this only months after Karzai, returned to office in a wildly fraudulent presidential election, overseeing a government riddled with corruption and drug money, and honeycombed with warlords sporting derelict reputations, was considered a discredited figure in Washington? And why do they think they can turn a man known mockingly as the "mayor" or "president" of Kabul (because his government has so little influence outside the capital) into a political force in southern Afghanistan?

And someone tell me: Just who picked the name Operation Moshtarak for the campaign in Marja? Why am I not convinced that it was an Afghan? Though news accounts say that the word means "togetherness" in Dari, why do I think that a better translation might be "crushing embrace"? What could "togetherness" really mean when, according to the Wall Street Journal, to make the final decision to launch the operation, already long announced, General McChrystal "stepped into his armored car for the short drive...to the presidential palace," and reportedly roused President Karzai from a nap for "a novel moment." Karzai agreed, of course, supposedly adding, "No one has ever asked me to decide before."

This is a black comedy of "governance." So is the fact that, from the highest administration officials and military men to those in the field, everyone speaks, evidently without the slightest self-consciousness, about putting an "Afghan face" on the (American) Marja campaign. National Security Adviser James Jones, for instance, spoke of the campaign having "'a much bigger Afghan face,' with two Afghans for every one U.S. soldier involved." And this way of thinking is so common that news reports regularly used the phrase, as in a recent a.s.sociated Press story: "Military officials say they are learning from past mistakes. The offensive is designed with an 'Afghan face.'"

And here's something else I'd like explained to me: Why does the U.S. press, at present so fierce about the lack of both "togetherness" and decent governance in Washington, report this sort of thing without comment, even though it reflects the deepest American contempt for putative "allies"? Why, for instance, can those same Wall Street Journal reporters write without blinking: "Western officials also are bringing Afghan cabinet members into strategy discussions, allowing them to select the officials who will run Marjah once it is cleared of Taliban, and pushing them before the cameras to emphasize the partic.i.p.ation of Afghan troops in the offensive"? Allow? Push? Is this what we mean by "togetherness"?

Try to imagine all this in reverse-an Afghan general motoring over to the White House to wake up the president and ask whether an operation, already announced and ready to roll, can leave the starting gate? But why go on?

Just explain this to me: Why are the representatives of Washington, civilian and military, always so tone deaf when it comes to other peoples and other cultures? Why is it so hard for them to imagine what it might be like to be in someone else's shoes (or boots or sandals)? Why do they always arrive not just convinced that they have identified the right problems and are asking the right questions, but that they, and only they, have the right answers, when at home they seem to have none at all?