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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

terrorism

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Unbecoming activism

Sand dunes seen from above. The sky looks almost white and the dunes are light to dark tan and brown. Via unsplash/pexel.In the second chapter of Confronting Injustice, Umair Muhammad recounts the United States’ role in the evolution of Somalian terrorist group al-Shabab. I wrote briefly about this group six weeks ago in an article on the recent film Eye in the Sky.

Like the other decentralized MENA terrorist group that need not be named, al-Shabab is a 30-year product of the US’ and UK’s Cold War proxy politics. The Cold War is now over (someone inform both Moscow and Washington), and a nation like Somalia shouldn’t have its people trapped between brutal authoritarianism on the one hand and drought-fueled famine on the other. But because it’s caught in the interests of much more powerful countries, al-Shabab emerged.

The same countries that criticize al-Shabab, Muhammad argues, created the conditions in which it thrives. And then he offers an icy analogy inspired by the writings of Peter Singer, the moral philosopher:

I should not push a child into a pond in which he will struggle to stay afloat, help to come up for air when I walk by once in a while, and act as if I am doing him a favor. I should, instead, stop pushing children into ponds. Likewise, those who benefit from the exploitation of others have a duty, first and foremost, to stop the ongoing exploitation. Simultaneously playing the roles of oppressor and savior is unbecoming.” —Umair Muhammad

It’s surreal to read about this this week. Today was Holocaust Remembrance Day, a day when we remember immense tragedy. Today was also a day when the US government abruptly voided historical immigration policies and made permanent residents, students, and others from seven countries newly vulnerable.

Bloomberg has a hunch about why those seven countries have been singled out, and ProPublica has solid analysis of today’s executive order. But it’s The Intercept that came up with the baldest assessment of the administration’s logic: “If we bombed you, we ban you.” That’s not quite “playing the roles of oppressor and savior.” There’ll be no saving from this administration.

What about from the rest of us? We haven’t funded, armed, or inspired militant groups around the planet, not directly, not consciously. But we’ve repeatedly elected politicians who have, and we’ve just sworn in another.

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Remote war and responsibility

On a white-blue background, a white four-armed photo drone hangs in the sky.
Photo credit: Clem Onojeghuo

Contains spoilers for Eye in the Sky.

The United States recently expanded its military activity in the Horn of Africa. Among the regional groups it now openly targets in the name of post-9/11 counter-terrorism is Al-Shabab (The Youth), a decentralized network based in Somalia and operating around the Somali-Kenyan border. The US has in fact been active in the area for months, using “Special Operations troops, airstrikes, private contractors and African allies” as its proxies.

The administration has decided to deem the Shabab, the Islamist militant group in Somalia, to be part of the armed conflict that Congress authorized against the perpetrators of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, according to senior American officials. The move is intended to shore up the legal basis for an intensifying campaign of airstrikes and other counterterrorism operations, carried out largely in support of African Union and Somali government forces.” — New York Times, November 27, 2016

A recent film makes this conflict its context. Directed by Gavin Hood, Eye in the Sky (2015) is a 90-minute study of a modern military drone attack on a house in a Kenyan neighborhood. Unlike US foreign policy, however, the film begins with the perspective of one Kenyan family: a father repairing his daughter’s toys, a mother baking bread for the daughter to sell, and, beyond their gate, traders, soldiers, and Wahhabi Muslims monitoring one another’s dress, families, and morals.

Fascinating for me given my doctoral research are sections of the film that feature government officials in the West, military leaders on the ground, and researchers, advisors, and drone operators in three countries (Kenya, the United Kingdom, and the United States). The audience observes these military, political, and legal representatives arguing from the logics of their respective domains: they each have to judge whether the UK should conduct a bombing that will injure or kill noncombatant neighborhood residents as well as people the two governments have named as enemies.

Can we bomb a house in a neighborhood in a country we aren’t explicitly bound to?

Should we?

What if a child will be caught in the blast radius?

What if there will be two children?

What if there are suicide bombers in the house?

What if we can watch the would-be bombers don their vests and get ready to deal death?

What if the bombers’ video gets onto YouTube?

What if Western governments’ secret surveillance footage gets onto YouTube?

What if the chain of decision-making offers more stalling than accountability?

What if the military’s risk estimates are fluffy?

What about the drone operators’ mental health?

What does it do to people to have the workday regularly include killing others remotely, watching them die, and then poking through the rubble to identify their remains?

What is our responsibility when all this and more happens in the name of the British and American public, and persists as governmental policy regardless of which political parties hold the reins?

Just as social media moderators experience trauma from their work, so do military drone operators tasked to surveil and sometimes kill. So, too, do people living out their lives with relatives while people thousands of miles away superimpose brutal geopolitics on their homes, families, and children.

Toward the end of Eye in the Sky, a general says to a disapproving politician, “Never tell a soldier he does not know the cost of war.”

Soldiers know the costs because they live it, and many of us may never know the cost ourselves. We might be able to grasp it remotely or through fiction, and if so, ok: some things no one should experience firsthand.