Grounding Drone Warfare

Madiha Tahir

How does a view from the ground reshape the analytics of US drone warfare? Through an ethnographic exploration of drone warfare from one of its sites of destruction—Pakistan and its borderlands known as the Tribal Areas—this dissertation troubles the notion of war-at-a-distance. Far from being at a remove, the war for many Pakistanis is in their neighborhoods, their fields, and their homes. Especially for ethnic Pashtuns who live amidst the drone war in the borderlands, attack drones are one element among a violent network—from Pakistani military helicopters to ground operations to armed guerrilla movements—that create radical disruptions. It is this dialectic between U.S. attacks and Pakistani state machinations that both produces ‘drone warfare’ and informs the analytics of Pashtuns and Pakistanis more generally vis-à-vis drone bombardment. By interrogating the relationship between...