US drone warfare in Waziristan has been legitimated through a discourse of military humanism that claims very low rates of civilian casualties and a concern to spare the lives of the innocent. In practice, in concert with the Pakistani government’s counterinsurgency campaign and the tactics of the Taliban, drone strikes in Waziristan have killed substantial numbers of civilians and, in a manner reminiscent of the effects of death squads in Central and Latin America, have torn apart Waziri civil society while creating a culture of terror. “Drone essentialism” (a false conviction that drones are inevitably used in a way that minimizes suffering) has concealed a process of “ethical slippage” through which drone operators relaxed their operational practices. This process of slippage enabled drones to become terror weapons even as they functioned at the level of discourse as alibis—signifiers of discriminate force. One task of anthropological analysis is to prize open the contradictions inherent in this situation.
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