In the twenty-first-century world of drone warfare, one question with two aspects reigns supreme: Who counts?
In Washington, the answers are the same: We don't count and they don't count.
The Obama administration has adamantly refused to count. Not a body. In fact, for a long time, American officials associated with Washington's drone assassination campaigns and "signature strikes" in the backlands of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Yemen claimed that there were no bodies to count, that the CIA's drones were so carefully handled and so "precise" that they never produced an unmeant corpse -- not a child, not a parent, not a wedding party. Nada.
When it came to "collateral damage," there was no need to count because there was nothing to tote up or, at worst, such civilian casualties were "in the single digits." 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 "the only game in town" when it came to al-Qaeda. And what a game it was. It needed no math, no metrics. As the Vietnam War had proved, counting was for losers -- other than the usual media reports that so many "militants" had died in a strike or that some al-Qaeda "lieutenant" or "leader" had gone down for the count.
That era ended on April 23rd when President Obama entered the White House briefing room and apologized for the deaths of American aid worker Warren Weinstein and Italian aid worker Giovanni Lo Porto, two Western hostages of al-Qaeda. 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 the word "drone," describing what happened vaguely as a "U.S. counterterrorism operation." In other words, it turned out that the administration was capable of counting -- at least to two.
And that brings us to the other meaning of "Who counts?" If you are an innocent American or Western civilian and a drone takes you out, you count. If you are an innocent Pakistani, Afghan, or Yemeni, you don't. You didn't count before the drone killed you and you don't count as a corpse either. For you, no one apologizes, no one pays your relatives compensation for your unjust death, no one even acknowledges that you existed. 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's never-ending war on terror.
A Brief History of the Body Count
Once upon a time, of course, enemy deaths were a badge of honor in war, but the American "body count," which would become infamous in the Vietnam era, had always been a product of frustration, not pride. It originated in the early 1950s, in the "meat-grinder" days of the Korean War, after the fighting had bogged down in a grim stalemate and signs of victory were hard to come by. It reappeared relatively early in the Vietnam War years as American officials began searching for "metrics" that would somehow express victory in a country where taking territory in the traditional fashion meant little. As time went on, the brutality of that war increased, and the promised "light at the end of the tunnel" 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. Soon enough, those reporters began referring to the daily announcements of those figures as the "Five O'Clock Follies."
On the ground, the pressure within the military to produce impressive body counts for those "Follies" resulted in what GIs called the "Mere Gook Rule." ("If it's dead and it's Vietnamese, it's VC [Viet Cong].") And soon enough anything counted as a body. As William Calley, Jr., of My Lai massacre fame, testified, "At that time, everything went into a body count -- VC, buffalo, pigs, cows. Something we did, you put it on your body count, sir... As long as it was high, that was all they wanted."
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. As a sign of success, increasingly detached from reality yet producing reality, it became a death-dealing Catch-22. As 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?
