In the twenty-first-century world of drone warfare, one question with two aspects reigns supreme: Who counts?<\/p>\n
In Washington, the answers are the same: We don\u2019t count<\/em> and they<\/em> don\u2019t count.<\/p>\n The Obama administration has adamantly refused to count. Not a body. In fact, for a long time, American officials associated with Washington\u2019s drone assassination campaigns and \u201csignature strikes<\/a>\u201d in the backlands of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Yemen claimed that there were no bodies to count<\/a>, that the CIA\u2019s drones were so carefully handled and so \u201cprecise\u201d that they never produced<\/a> an unmeant corpse — not a child<\/a>, not a parent, not a wedding party<\/a>. Nada.<\/p>\n When it came to \u201ccollateral damage,\u201d there was no need to count because there was nothing to tote up or, at worst, such civilian casualties were<\/a> \u201cin the single digits.\u201d\u00a0 That this was balderdash, that often when those drones unleashed their Hellfire missiles they were unsure who exactly was being targeted, that civilians were dying in relatively countable numbers — and that others were indeed counting them — mattered little, at least in this country until recently. Drone war was, after all, innovative and, as presented by two administrations, quite miraculous. In 2009, CIA Director Leon Panetta called it<\/a> \u201cthe only game in town\u201d when it came to al-Qaeda.\u00a0 And what a game it was.\u00a0 It needed no math, no metrics.\u00a0 As the Vietnam War had proved, counting was for losers — other than the usual media reports that so many \u201cmilitants\u201d had died in a strike or that some al-Qaeda \u201clieutenant\u201d or \u201cleader\u201d had gone down<\/a> for the count.<\/p>\n That era ended on April 23rd when President Obama entered the White House briefing room and apologized<\/a> for the deaths of American aid worker Warren Weinstein and Italian aid worker Giovanni Lo Porto, two Western hostages of al-Qaeda.\u00a0 They had, the president confessed, been obliterated in a strike against a terrorist compound in Pakistan, though in his comments he managed not to mention<\/a> the word \u201cdrone,\u201d describing what happened vaguely as a \u201cU.S. counterterrorism operation.\u201d\u00a0 In other words, it turned out that the administration was capable of counting — at least to two.<\/p>\n And that brings us to the other meaning of \u201cWho counts?\u201d\u00a0 If you are an innocent American or Western civilian and a drone takes you out, you count.\u00a0 If you are an innocent Pakistani, Afghan, or Yemeni, you don\u2019t.\u00a0 You didn\u2019t count before the drone killed you and you don\u2019t count as a corpse either.\u00a0 For you, no one apologizes, no one pays<\/a> your relatives compensation for your unjust death, no one even acknowledges that you existed.\u00a0 This is modern American drone reality and the question of who counts and whom, if anyone, to count is part of the contested legacy of Washington\u2019s never-ending war on terror.<\/p>\n A Brief History of the Body Count<\/strong><\/p>\n Once upon a time, of course, enemy deaths were a badge of honor in war, but the American \u201cbody count,\u201d which would become infamous in the Vietnam era, had always been a product of frustration, not pride.\u00a0 It originated in the early 1950s, in the \u201cmeat-grinder\u201d days of the Korean War, after the fighting had bogged down in a grim stalemate and signs of victory were hard to come by.\u00a0 It reappeared relatively early in the Vietnam War years as American officials began searching for \u201cmetrics\u201d that would somehow express victory in a country where taking territory in the traditional fashion meant little.\u00a0 As time went on, the brutality of that war increased, and the promised \u201clight at the end of the tunnel\u201d glowed ever more dimly, the metrics of victory only grew, and the pressure to produce that body count, which could be announced daily by U.S. press spokesmen to increasingly dubious journalists in Saigon did, too.\u00a0 Soon enough, those reporters began referring to the daily announcements of those figures as the \u201cFive O\u2019Clock Follies<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n On the ground, the pressure within the military to produce impressive body counts for those \u201cFollies\u201d resulted in what GIs called the \u201cMere Gook Rule.\u201d (\u201cIf it\u2019s dead and it\u2019s Vietnamese, it\u2019s VC [Viet Cong].\u201d)\u00a0 And soon enough anything counted as a body.\u00a0 As William Calley, Jr., of My Lai massacre fame, testified, \u201cAt that time, everything went into a body count — VC, buffalo, pigs, cows.\u00a0 Something we did, you put it on your body count, sir… As long as it was high, that was all they wanted.\u201d<\/p>\n When, however, victory proved illusory, that body count came to appear to ever more Americans on the home front like grim slaughter and a metric from hell.\u00a0 As a sign of success, increasingly detached from reality yet producing reality, it became a death-dealing Catch-22. \u00a0\u00a0As those bodies piled up and in the terminology of the times a “credibility gap” yawned between the metrics and reality, the body count became a symbol not just of a war of frustration, but of defeat itself. It came, especially after the news of the My Lai massacre finally broke in the U.S., to look both false and barbaric. Whose bodies were those anyway?<\/p>\n In the post-Vietnam era, not surprisingly, Washington would treat anything associated with the disaster that had been Vietnam as if it were radioactive.\u00a0 So when, in the wake of the 9\/11 attacks, the Bush administration\u2019s top officials began planning their twenty-first-century wars in a state of exhilarated anticipation, they had no intention of reliving anything that reeked of Vietnam.\u00a0 There would be no body bags coming home<\/a> in the glare of media attention, no body counts in the battle zones.\u00a0 They were ready to play an opposites game when it came to Vietnam. General Tommy Franks, who directed the\u00a0Afghan invasion and then the one in Iraq, caught the mood perfectly in 2003 when he said<\/a>, \u201cWe don\u2019t do body counts.\u201d<\/p>\n There would be no more \u201cFive O\u2019clock Follies,\u201d not in wars in which victory was assured for \u201cthe greatest force for freedom in the history of the world\u201d and \u201cthe finest fighting force that the world has ever known\u201d (as presidents took to calling<\/a> the U.S. military).\u00a0 And that remains official military policy today.\u00a0 Only recently, for instance, Pentagon spokesman Rear Admiral John Kirby responded<\/a> to a journalist\u2019s question about how many Islamic State fighters and civilians U.S. air power had recently killed in Washington\u2019s latest war in Iraq this way: \u201cFirst of all, we don’t have the ability to — to count every nose that we shwack [sic]. Number two, that’s not the goal. That’s not the goal… And we’re not getting into an issue of body counts. And that’s why I don’t have that number handy. I wouldn’t — I wouldn’t have asked my staff to give me that number before I came out here. It’s simply not a relevant figure.\u201d<\/p>\n From 2003 to 2015, official policy on the body count has not reflected reality.\u00a0 The U.S. military has, in fact, continued to count bodies.\u00a0 For one thing, it kept and reported<\/a> the numbers on America\u2019s war dead<\/a>, bodies that truly counted, though no one would have called the tallies a body count.\u00a0 For another, from beginning to end, the military has been secretly counting the dead on the other side as well, perhaps to privately convince themselves, Vietnam-style, that they were indeed winning in wars where a twenty-first-century version of the credibility gap appeared all too quickly and never left the scene.\u00a0 As David Axe has written<\/a>, the military \u201cproudly boasts of the totals in official documents that it never intends for public circulation.\u201d\u00a0 He added, \u201cThe disconnect over wartime body counts reflects a yawning gap between the military\u2019s public face and its private culture.\u201d<\/p>\n To Count or Not to Count, That Is the Question<\/strong><\/p>\n But here was the oddest thing: whatever the military might have been counting, the fact that it stopped counting in public didn\u2019t stop the body count from happening.\u00a0 It turned out that there were others on this planet no less capable of counting dead bodies.\u00a0 In the end, the cast of characters producing the public metrics of this era simply changed and with it the purpose of the count.\u00a0 The newcomers had, you might say, different answers to both parts of the question: Who counts?<\/p>\n Over the last century, as \u201ccollateral damage\u201d — the deaths of civilians, rather than combatants — has become ever more the essence<\/a> of war, the importance of who is dying and in what numbers has only increased.\u00a0 When the U.S. military began refusing to make its body count part of a public celebration of its successes, civil society stepped in with a very different impulse: to shame, blame, and hold the military\u2019s feet to the fire by revealing the deeper carnage of war itself and what it does to society, not just to the warriors.<\/p>\n While the previous counters had pretended that all bodies belonged to enemies, the new counters tried to make \u201ccollateral damage\u201d the central issue of war. \u00a0No matter what the researchers who have done such counts may say, most of them are, by their nature, critiques of war, American-style, and included in them were no longer just the bodies, civilian and military, found on the battlefield, but every body that could somehow be linked to a conflict or its fallout, its side effects, its afteraffects.<\/p>\n Think of this as a new numerology of defeat or disaster or slaughter or shame.\u00a0 In the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, distinctly non-military outfits took up this counting or estimating process.\u00a0 In 2004 and 2006, the Lancet<\/em>, a British medical journal, published studies<\/a> based on scientific surveys of \u201cexcess Iraqi deaths\u201d since the American invasion of 2003 and, in the first case, came up with an estimated 98,000 of them and in the second with 655,000 (a much-criticized<\/a> figure<\/a>); such studies by medical and other researchers have never stopped.\u00a0 More recent counts of such deaths have ranged from 500,000<\/a> in 2013 to one million<\/a> or 5% of the Iraqi population this year.<\/p>\n The most famous enumeration of civilian casualties in Iraq, however, comes from the constantly upgraded tally — based on published media reports, hospital and morgue records, and the like — of Iraq Body Count<\/a>, the independent website that bills itself as \u201cthe public record of violent deaths following the 2003 invasion of Iraq.\u201d\u00a0 At this moment, its most up-to-date top estimate for civilian deaths since that invasion is 156,000 (211,000, including the deaths of combatants).\u00a0 And these figures are considered by the site and others as distinctly conservative, no more than what can be known about a subject of which much is, by necessity, unknown.<\/p>\n In Afghanistan, there has been less tallying, but the U.N. Mission there has kept a count<\/a> of civilian casualties from the ongoing war and estimates the cumulative figure, since 2001, at 21,000<\/a> (though again, that is undoubtedly a conservative figure).\u00a0 However, when it comes to the American drone campaigns in Pakistan and Yemen, in particular, where the Obama administration has adamantly resisted the idea of significant civilian casualties, the civilian counters have been there under the most impressively<\/a> difficult circumstances, sometimes with representatives on the ground in distant parts of Pakistan and elsewhere.\u00a0 In a world in which drone operators refer to the victims of their strikes as \u201cbug splat<\/a>\u201d and top administration officials prefer to obliterate those \u201cbugs\u201d a second time by denying that their deaths even occurred, the attempt to give them back their names, ages, and sexes, to remind the world of what was most human about the dead of our new wars, should be considered a heroic task.<\/p>\n The London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, in particular, has done careful as well as dogged work tabulating drone casualties<\/a> in Pakistan and Yemen, including counts and estimates of all those killed by drones, of civilians killed by drones, and of children killed by drones.\u00a0 It even has a project, \u201cNaming the Dead<\/a>,\u201d that attempts to reattach names and other basic personal information — sometimes even photos — to the previously nameless dead (721 of them so far).\u00a0 The Long War Journal<\/em> (a militarized exception to the rule when it comes to the counters of this era) has also kept a record of what it could dig up about drone deaths in Pakistan<\/a> and Yemen<\/a>, as has the New America Foundation<\/a> on Pakistan.\u00a0 In 2012 the Columbia Law School Human Rights Clinic studied the three sources of such counts and issued a report<\/a> of its own.<\/p>\n Among the more fascinating reports, the human-rights group Reprieve recently considered claims to drone \u201cprecision\u201d and surgical accuracy by doing its own analysis<\/a> of the available data.\u00a0 It concluded that, in trying to target and assassinate 41 enemy figures in Pakistan and Yemen over the years, Washington\u2019s drones had managed to kill 1,147 people without even killing all the figures actually targeted.\u00a0 (As Spencer Ackerman of the Guardian<\/em> wrote<\/a>, \u201cThe drones came for Ayman Zawahiri on 13 January 2006, hovering over a village in Pakistan called Damadola. Ten months later, they came again for the man who would become al-Qaida\u2019s leader, this time in Bajaur. Eight years later, Zawahiri is still alive. Seventy-six children and 29 adults, according to reports after the two strikes, are not.\u201d)<\/p>\n In other words, when it came to counting, civil society rode to the rescue, though the impact of the figures produced has remained limited indeed in this country.\u00a0 In some ways, the only body count of any sort that has made an impression here in recent years has been sniper Chris Kyle\u2019s 160<\/a> confirmed Iraqi \u201ckills\u201d that played such a part in the publicity for the blockbuster movie American Sniper<\/em>.<\/p>\n Exceptional Killers<\/strong><\/p>\n In his public apology for deaths that were clearly embarrassing to him, President Obama managed to fall back on a trope that has become ever more politically commonplace in these years.\u00a0 Even in the context of a situation in which two innocent hostages had been killed, he congratulated himself and all Americans for the exceptional nature of this country. \u201cIt is a cruel and bitter truth,\u201d he said, \u201cthat in the fog of war generally and our fight against terrorists specifically, mistakes — sometimes deadly mistakes — can occur.\u00a0 But one of the things that sets America apart from many other nations, one of the things that makes us exceptional is our willingness to confront squarely our imperfections and to learn from our mistakes.\u201d<\/p>\n Whatever our missteps, in other words, we Americans are exceptional killers in a world of ordinary ones.\u00a0 This attitude has infused Obama\u2019s global assassination program and the White House \u201ckill list\u201d that goes with it and that the president has personally overseen.\u00a0 Pride<\/a> in his killing agenda was evident in the decision to leak<\/a> news of that list to the New York Times<\/em> back in May 2012.\u00a0 And this version of American exceptionalism fits well with the exceptionalism of the drone itself — even if it is a weapon guaranteed to become less exceptional as it spreads to more countries (in part through recently green-lighted U.S. drone sales<\/a> to allies).<\/p>\n On the rarest of occasions, Obama admitted in that White House briefing room, drone strikes even kill exceptional people (like us) who need to be attended to presidentially, whose deaths deserve apologies, whose lives are to be highlighted in special media accounts, and whose value is such that recompense is due to their families.\u00a0 In most of the places the drone goes, however, those it kills by mistake are, by definition, unexceptional.\u00a0 They deserve neither notice nor apology nor recompense.\u00a0 They count for nothing.<\/p>\n One thing makes the drone a unique weapon in the world of the uncounted dead on a planet where killing otherwise seems like a dime-a-dozen activity: its pilot, its \u201ccrew,\u201d those who trigger the launch of its missiles are hundreds, even thousands of miles away from danger.\u00a0 Though we speak loosely about drone \u201cwarfare,\u201d the way that machine functions bears little relation to war as it was once defined.\u00a0 Conceptually, the drone represents a one-way street of destruction.\u00a0 Because in its version of \u201cwarfare\u201d only one side can be hurt, its \u201csignature\u201d is slaughter, not war, no matter how carefully it may be used.\u00a0 It is an executioner\u2019s weapon.<\/p>\n In part because of that, it\u2019s also a blowback weapon.\u00a0 Though it may surprise Americans, those to be slaughtered, the hunted<\/a>, don\u2019t take to the constant buzz of drones in their skies in a kindly fashion.\u00a0 They reportedly exhibit the symptoms of PTSD<\/a>; they are resentful; they grasp the unfairness and injustice that lies behind the machine and its form of \u201cwarfare\u201d and are unimpressed with the exceptionalism of the Americans using it.\u00a0 As a result, drones across the Greater Middle East have been the equivalent of recruitment posters<\/a> for those who want revenge and so for extremist outfits everywhere.<\/p>\n Drones should be weapons of shame and yet, despite the recent round of criticism here in the wake of the hostage killings, their use is still widely supported<\/a> in Washington and among the public<\/a>.\u00a0 The justification for their use, whatever \u201clegal\u201d white papers<\/a> the Obama administration has produced as cover, is simple enough: power.\u00a0 We send them across sovereign boundaries as we wish in search of those we want to kill because we can, because we are us.<\/p>\n So all praise to the few in our world who think it worth the bother to count those who count for nothing to us. They do matter.<\/p>\n _____________________________<\/p>\n Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the <\/em>American Empire Project<\/em><\/a> and the author of <\/em>The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, <\/em>The End of Victory Culture<\/a>. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs <\/em>TomDispatch.com<\/a>. His latest book is <\/em>Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World<\/a>.<\/p>\n