343
*  Vienna, Austria
 contact@fahimamir.com | https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7368-2749
Fahim Amir*
Drones, Bodies, Necropolitics: 
Hobbesian Shadows over Afghan Lands
Keywords
Afghanistan, drone, necropolitics, frontier, government, state
Abstract
The article reflects the discourses surrounding the military use of drones in the context 
of their employment in Afghanistan and Waziristan in the last two decades with a special 
emphasis on its necropolitical dimensions. It does so by first summarizing different crit-
ical accounts of a single well documented case in Afghanistan, underscoring historical 
continuities between drone warfare, state terror and air power. Second, the article puts a 
special emphasis on relations on the ground such as ambiguous legal constructions en-
abling the use of lethal force, and the weaponization of Pashtun culture for the purposes 
of different governments.
Droni, telesa, nekropolitika: hobbesovske sence nad 
afganistanskimi ozemlji
Ključne besede
Afganistan, dron, nekropolitika, meja, vlada, država
Povzetek 
Članek obravnava diskurze, ki spremljajo vojaško uporabo dronov v Afganistanu in 
Vaziristanu v zadnjih dveh desetletjih s posebnim poudarkom na njihovi nekropolitični 
razsežnosti. Članek najprej povzame različne kritične obravnave edinega dobro doku-
mentiranega primera v Afganistanu, s tem, da poudari zgodovinske kontinuitete med 
vojskovanjem z brezpilotnimi letali, državnim terorjem in zračnimi silami. Dalje nameni 
članek poseben poudarek še odnosom na terenu, kot so dvoumne pravne konstrukcije, ki 
Filozofski vestnik
issn 0353-4510 | Volume 44 | Number 2 | 2023 | 343–66
cc by-sa 4.0 | doi: 10.3986/fv.44.2.16

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fahim amir
omogočajo uporabo smrtonosnega orožja, in oboroževanje paštunske kulture za namene 
različnih vlad.
∞
There is no country on earth more subject to misrepresentations based upon Ori-
entalism than Afghanistan. 
—Shah Mahmoud Hanifi
1
Sovereignty implies “space,” and what is more, it implies a space against which 
violence, whether latent or overt, is directed—a space established and constitut-
ed by violence. 
—Henri Lefebvre
2
I carried this boy on my back from Kabul. It took me two weeks. So just don’t tell 
me that he’s rubbish to be thrown away. 
—Afghan man, Mental Health Center, Peshawer
3
In “The Body” issue of this journal two decades ago, Afghanistan is mentioned 
once, more precisely in the deployment of the “most sophisticated surveillance 
and reconnaissance innovations” of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).
4
 The ge-
opolitical “war on terror” had just begun with the invasion of Afghanistan; its 
future and the role of UAVs (“drones”) as part of combat operations, tested in 
Bosnia in 1995 and deployed in Afghanistan in 2001, were still uncertain. In the 
meantime, the US invasion of Afghanistan has ended in a remarkably shameful 
and inglorious way. The most powerful and at the same time most fearful na-
tion in the world, now trains more drone operators than aircraft pilots. While in 
1 
Shah Mahmoud Hanifi, “A Genealogy of Orientalism in Afghanistan: The Colonial Image 
Lineage,” in Middle East Studies after September 11: Neo-Orientalism, American Hegemony 
and Academia, ed. Tugrul Keskin (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 50.
2 
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Malden: Black-
well, 1991), 280. 
3 
Cited in M. Miles, “Formal and Informal Disability Resources for Afghan Reconstruction,” 
Third World Quarterly 23, no. 5 (2002): 945, https://doi.org/10.1080/0143659022000028567 .
4 
Nina Czeglédy and André P. Czeglédy, “The Body as Password: Biometrics and Corporeal 
Dispossession,” in “The Body/Le corps/Der Körper,” ed. Marina Gržinić Mauhler, special 
issue, Filozofski vestnik 23, no. 2 (2002): 79.

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drones, bodies, necropolitics: hobbesian shadows over afghan lands
the West the feminized honeybee became the darling animal of ecocapitalists 
and the insect mascot of contemporary environmental politics, its metaphorical 
male counterparts, the Predator and Reaper drones have increasingly been de-
ployed to perform their heroic duty of surveillance and bomb dropping.
5
 At the 
beginning of the third Christian millennium, the enabler of life and the harbin-
ger of death seemingly belong to the same species.
The dronification and simultaneous privatization of war (by mercenary corpo-
rations) can be understood first of all as two aspects of the same fixation on 
unmanned combat, which promises to free states from the burden of accounta-
bility for war crimes.
6
 Drones are celebrated by the manufacturer thereof, poli-
ticians, the military, and the media for reducing the chance of a country’s own 
soldiers being injured or killed, since the latter physically never arrive at the 
battlefield—while multiplying the capabilities of bodies to inflict pain, terror, 
and surveillance. The involvement of high-tech, artificial intelligence and the 
remoteness of the operating team to the battlefield are regularly highlighted as 
further reducing human error because decisions are not made in the heat of 
battle. They are especially heralded as being more ethical and therefore civi-
lized, because their precision and enhanced surveillance capabilities reduce the 
chance of innocent bystanders being killed (“collateral damage”).
From a historical perspective, the humanitarian rationality discourse of supe-
riorly civilized and law-abiding occidental state violence utilized in defense of 
drones bears innumerable marks of imperial reasoning, not the least of which is 
the juxtaposing of one side’s allegedly virtuosic and sober killing with the indis-
criminately murderous irrationality of the enemy.
7
 On closer inspection, it turns 
out that it is precisely the techno-fetishism surrounding drones that helps the 
most detestable forms of organized state violence to appear accurate, unsullied, 
and even noble.
8
 One particular drone operation in Uruzgan, central Afghani-
5 
Fahim Amir, “Cloudy Swords,” in Being and Swine: The End of Nature (As We Knew It), 
trans. Geoffrey C. Howes and Corvin Russell (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2020), 121–52.
6 
Bianca Baggiarini, “Drone Warfare and the Limits of Sacrifice,” Journal of International 
Political Theory 11, no. 1 (February 2015): 128–44, https://doi.org/10.1177/1755088214555597 .
7 
Marina Espinoza, “State Terrorism: Orientalism and the Drone Programme,” Critical 
Studies on Terrorism 11, no. 2 (2018): 379, https://doi.org/10.1080/17539153.2018.1456725.
8 
Tyler Wall and Torin Monahan, “Surveillance and Violence from Afar: The Politics of 
Drones and Liminal Security-Scapes,” Theoretical Criminology 15, no. 3 (August 2011): 246, 

346
fahim amir
stan, in 2011 has gained special relevance for critical theorization, because it is 
unusually well documented. Laura Cox’s analysis of the perfectly normal op-
eration clears the rhetorical fogs camouflaging today’s imperial war machines 
and shows that “through the intermediation of algorithmic, visual, and affective 
modes of embodiment, drone warfare reproduces gendered and racialized bod-
ies that enable a necropolitics of massacre.”
9
 Before we come back to historical 
perspectives and closer inspections, let us recapitulate what is meant by the no-
tion of necropolitics in this context.
Achille Mbembe defines necropolitics as “contemporary forms of the subjuga-
tion of life to the power of death,” which have received too little attention in 
normative conceptions of sovereignty as well as in biopolitical theorizing in the 
wake of Michel Foucault’s work.
10
 According to Foucault, traditional sovereign-
ty was primarily thanatopower, the power to determine who must die and who 
may live. The object of this sovereign power was the individual body, sometimes 
subjected to spectacular forms of violence. In his critique of the political anato-
my of occidental bodies, Foucault traced a new form of disciplinary power that 
monitored the individual body through architectures and manipulated it by 
means of orthopedics to render it at the same time more efficient and more doc-
ile.
11
 Subsequently, Foucault introduced the concept of biopower, which takes as 
its object the historically new category of population, which it simultaneously 
constitutes and whose life processes it affirms and manages. In Foucault’s un-
derstanding, racism operates precisely here, within biopower, with the dubious 
category of race performing a “biological-type caesura within a population,”
12
 
and distinguishing between relevant and irrelevant life, according to the log-
https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480610396650.
9 
Lauren Wilcox, “Embodying Algorithmic War: Gender, Race, and the Posthuman in 
Drone Warfare,” Security Dialogue 48, no. 1 (February 2017): 11, https://doi.org/10.1177/ 
0967010616657947.
10 
Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 
40, https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-15-1-11. Mbembe’s article appeared in slightly revised 
form as part of Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, trans. Steven Corcoran (Durham: Duke 
University Press, 2019), 68–92. In the following the latest version will be referred to.
11 
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New 
York: Random House, 1977).
12 
Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collége de France 1975–
1976, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (New York: 
Picador, 2003), 255.

347
drones, bodies, necropolitics: hobbesian shadows over afghan lands
ic that “the death of others makes one biologically stronger insofar as one is a 
member of a race or a population.”
13
 In addition, “biopower functions through—
the old sovereign power”
14
 via racism, it thus also operates between different 
forms of power and allows modern states to exercise ancient thanatopower 
within modernized biopolitical coordinates. Foucault considered this particular 
double-headedness to enable an elastic form of government encompassing old 
and new forms of power.
15
 In this light, the drone proves to be a necropolitical 
entity in the Mbembian sense—surveilling, mapping, and inspecting to deter-
mine “who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not.”
16
 That 
is why Jamie Allinson sees a form of “paradoxical biopolitics”
17
 at work in drone 
operation: Afghans are “known and audited through the gaze of the drone, but 
for the purpose of death rather than life.”
18
While public opinion is dominated by the impression that the use of weap-
onized drones is primarily reserved for personality strikes on high profile targets 
marked on kill lists, possibly signed off on by some president, drone theorist 
Grégoire Chamayou points to the reality that the majority of drone strikes are 
signature strikes, that is, the bombing of a human being that could be a high 
profile target or somebody associated with this person on the basis of patterns-
of-life analyses.
19
 For that, first the mass of the spatiotemporal data of the sur-
veilled population is combined with social particulars to form patterns-of-life, 
which are then compared with a pre-established signature defining suspicious 
activity, not a specific identity. To make this point clear, the mere suspicion that 
somebody “wanted” could be at a given place and time is regarded as legitimate 
grounds for bombing the whole area, resulting in crowd killings. Whoever thinks 
that the rock bottom has been reached is utterly wrong: the perfidious practice 
of double taps targets already bombed sites in swift sequence to multiply the ex-
13 
Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 258.
14 
Foucault, 258.
15 
Kim Su Rasmussen, “Foucault’s Genealogy of Racism,” Theory, Culture and Society 28, no. 
5 (September 2011): 34–51, https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276411410448.
16 
Mbembe, Necropolitics, 80.
17 
Jamie Allinson, “The Necropolitics of Drones,” International Political Sociology 9, no. 2 
(June 2015): 119, https://doi.org/10.1111/ips.12086.
18 
Allinson, 120.
19 
Grégoire Chamayou, Drone Theory, trans. Janet Loyd (London: Penguin, 2015), 46–51.

348
fahim amir
tent of death and to target the elementary urge of neighbors, friends, family, and 
first responders to come to help.
Notwithstanding the rhetoric of surgical precision, legal experts draw attention 
to the fact that officially “all adult males killed by strikes” are defined as “mil -
itants,” “absent exonerating evidence.”
20
 The liberal rule of law that a suspect 
is innocent until proven otherwise is turned into a cynical caricature; only the 
dead are allowed to prove their innocence. How practical that most of those 
targeted are incinerated by drone attacks. The technical “precision” of a bomb 
drop is rendered meaningless if one considers the unscrupulous necropolitical 
targeting. When after the fall of Kabul, “wanted persons” who had repeatedly 
been officially declared as having been killed by drones took charge of govern-
ment positions, the question arose as regards how many innocent lives of chil-
dren, women, the elderly, and disabled human beings had been incinerated by 
humane drone attacks, obviously without such ever having achieved the end 
that supposedly had justified such means.
In the case of the mentioned Uruzgan massacre, the transcripts and materials of 
the several-hours-long deliberations of the drone crew provide insight into the 
process of transforming a group of innocent Afghans of Hazara ethnicity into 
legitimate targets of extermination. Such observations and assumptions, usu-
ally not detailed further, involve, for example, the supposedly “tactical behav-
ior” of the surveilled (one survivor later reported that they had left their cars to 
pray) and culturalistic interpretations of the way the surveilled urinated (Arabs 
allegedly do it in a sitting position, Afghans while standing).
21
 The engender-
ing gaze of the crew, saturated with the toxic masculinity of white superiority, 
labelled the Afghan clothing of a surveilled man as “man dresses”
22
 and sus-
pected that he knew the guidelines of the drone crews and therefore concealed 
a weapon: “ An Afghan male without a visible weapon thereby becomes grounds 
20 
International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic (Stanford Law School) and 
Global Justice Clinic (NYU School of Law), Living Under Drones: Death, Injury and Trauma 
to Civilians from US Drone Practices in Pakistan (Stanford and New York, 2012), x.
21 
Wilcox, “Embodying Algorithmic War,” 14.
22 
See “Drone FOIA—Department of Defense Uruzgan Investigation Documents,” American 
Civil Liberties Union, accessed August 2, 2023, https://www.aclu.org/drone-foia-depart -
ment-defense-documents.

349
drones, bodies, necropolitics: hobbesian shadows over afghan lands
for a threat.”
23
 The analysis of the Uruzgan massacre shows the visceral and af-
fective fervor of the operating team to assimilate also children and women into 
the classification of military-aged male, “to which category all Afghans beneath 
the Predator’s gaze have by this point been assimilated,”
24
 and whom it is per-
missible to put to death.
The discourse of unmannedness obscures the fact that almost two hundred peo-
ple are involved in the choreography of a single drone strike, forming, in the 
words of Mbembe, a synthesis of “massacre and bureaucracy—that incarnation 
of Western rationality.”
25
 Furthermore, it is not a neutral screen on which the 
23 killed innocents of Uruzgan, “shopkeepers, students, and families with chil-
dren, traveling together to Kabul out of concern for vehicles breaking down,”
26
 
appeared to be suspect military-aged Afghan males ready to be massacred.
The visibilities and invisibilities produced by the drone assemblage are “not 
technical but rather techno-cultural accomplishments,” argues Derek Gregory.
27
 
They are not elements of an otherwise neutral, rational, and objective distanc-
ing machine, but produce specific forms of techno-culturally mediated orien-
talist familiarity and proximity. A profoundly necropolitical dispositif is at play 
here that “consistently privileges the view of the hunter-killer”
28
 to dehumanize 
and annihilate so that “it was virtually impossible for the victims of the attack to 
be seen as civilians until it was too late.”
29
One telling detail is the way Afghanistan is regularly referred to by US and allied 
soldiers: as “Injun country.”
30
 By transferring the genocidal triumphalism and 
23 
Allinson, “Necropolitics of Drones,” 125.
24 
Allinson, 123.
25 
Mbembe, Necropolitics, 76. Concerning the idea of unmannedness, it must certainly be an 
innocent coincidence that the modern killing machines are often described by the military 
as MALE (Mid-Altitude Long-Endurance) drones. Derek Gregory, “From a View to a Kill: 
Drones and Late Modern War,” Theory, Culture and Society 28, no. 7–8 (December 2011): 
208, https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276411423027 .
26 
Wilcox, “Embodying Algorithmic War,” 12.
27 
Gregory, “From a View to a Kill,” 193.
28 
Gregory, 193.
29 
Gregory, 203.
30 
Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman, and Silvia Posocco, eds., Queer Necropolitics (Abingdon: 
Routledge, 2014), xvii.

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fahim amir
colonial Othering essential to the US national narrative of frontier expansion to 
Afghan soil, the metaphor of “Indian Country” conveys the enduring desire to 
annihilate and marginalize those who are regarded as savage and uncivilized, 
as can be seen in the widespread usage of this trope in US military discourses by 
both high-ranking as well as average foot soldiers in the context of the Vietnam, 
Iraq, and Afghanistan wars.
31
Evil Eyes in the Skies
The techno-fetishistically charged aura of novelty encircling the targeted kill-
ings programs in Afghanistan is further shattered by tracing its continuities to 
the “unconventional warfare” doctrine developed in the Cold War to enable US 
covert operations with unrestricted violence.
32
 Operation Phoenix in Vietnam 
in the 1960s and Operation Condor in Latin America in the 1970s had already 
relied upon mass intelligence gathering to extinguish the leadership of revolts 
and spread terror among their acquaintances, families, neighbors, and their so-
cial worlds. By operating covertly, state violence historically aimed at escaping 
accountability. Another “striking” continuity between contemporary drone war-
fare and these past counter-insurgency operations is the utter lack of transpar-
ency concerning the methods and criteria upon which decisions to torture, de-
tain, or kill are made. A new twenty-first century entry in the book of counter-in-
surgency is lawfare—the conscious determination to inflict an extreme form of 
violence while making great efforts to evade possible future prosecution.
33
 Ter-
ror is unleashed on the innocent not as a state secret, but in the form of gaslight-
ing, mocking the very idea of law while in the trappings of law.
The childlike fascination that an unmanned drone is able to generate conceals 
historical continuities of colonial policing and aerial occupation.
34
 Constantly 
31 
Stephen W. Silliman, “The ‘Old West’ in the Middle East: U.S. Military Metaphors in Real 
and Imagined Indian Country,” American Anthropologist 110, no. 2 (June 2008): 245, 
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1433.2008.00029.x.
32 
Ruth Blakeley, “Drones, State Terrorism and International Law,” Critical Studies on 
Terrorism 11, no. 2 (2018): 321–41, https://doi.org/10.1080/17539153.2018.1456722.
33 
Blakeley, 335.
34 
Mark Neocleous, War Power, Police Power (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014); 
Ian Shaw and Majed Akhter, “The Unbearable Humanness of Drone Warfare in FATA, 
Pakistan,” Antipode 44, no. 4 (September 2012): 1490–509, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-
8330.2011.00940.x.

351
drones, bodies, necropolitics: hobbesian shadows over afghan lands
hovering over their target areas to allow the unblinking eye to scrutinize the 
whole existence of a population with occasional spasms of lethal kinetics cre-
ates an atmosphere of permanent vulnerability and nakedness. The operating 
crews change and regenerate, while the drone is able to continuously hover and 
watch. An option the watched do not have. Since bombings can happen at any 
time and no place or sociality is sacred to the hostile eye, the targeted popu-
lation lives in a state of continuous and inescapable fear of being killed. The 
drone is an instrument of terror as widespread anxiety, insomnia, fainting, body 
aches, vomiting, respiratory issues, headaches, nightmares, manic behavior, 
nervous breakdowns, and irritability occur en masse without a physical expla-
nation. Economic hardship through material destruction affects an already im-
poverished population, hinders education, and aims at the destruction of the 
social fabric. Children scream in terror when they hear the sound of a drone.
35
These are not unwanted effects, but the purposefully deployed tactics of Mbem-
bian “vertical sovereignty” that locate the drone in the wider history of air pow-
er and imperial defense.
36
 As military documents show, contemporary drone 
warfare in Afghanistan and beyond its borders in the so-called “tribal” areas of 
Pakistan has learnt a lot from the experimental policing practices of British air 
power in the Iraq of the 1920s.
37
 In relation to this historical context, Priya Satia 
notes: “The crux of the matter is not so much that drones are unmanned, but 
that they promise panoptic aerial surveillance of a region understood as other-
wise essentially unknowable.”
38
While strategic bombing is mostly discussed in the context of European total 
wars, bombing from the air did not start in Europe, but had—like modernity as 
a whole—the colonies as a laboratory.
39
 The management of revolts in an over-
stretched British Empire had become increasingly costly, so the new idea to 
35 
See Shala Cachelin, “The U.S. Drone Programme, Imperial Air Power and Pakistan’s 
Federally Administered Tribal Areas,” Critical Studies on Terrorism 15, no. 2 (2022): 451, 
https://doi.org/10.1080/17539153.2021.2013025.
36 
Mbembe, Necropolitics, 81.
37 
Neocleous, War Power, Police Power.
38 
Priya Satia, “Drones: A History from the British Middle East,” Humanity: An International 
Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 5, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 1, 
http://doi.org/10.1353/hum.2014.0002.
39 
Thomas Hippler, Governing from the Skies: A Global History of Aerial Bombing, trans. David 
Fernbach (London: Verso, 2017); see also Tom Avermaete, Serhat Karakayali, and Marion 

352
fahim amir
spare the expensive and unpopular deployment of ground troops by the use of 
air power as a cheap means of imperial defense had some appeal. The first real 
trial for this administratively and strategically much disputed idea arose quick-
ly in the “Third Anglo-Afghan War” of 1919 (British denomination), with an air-
craft that had been designed specifically for the bombing of Berlin, but since 
peace broke out before this plan could be realized, Kabul was bombed instead in 
May 1919. The outcome was mixed, but the Kabul raid would be repeatedly ad-
duced as evidence that “air power would prove most valuable to the Empire in 
a policing role.”
40
 Air power was soon used in Yemen, Egypt, Punjab, and Iraq, 
but the longest and most widespread use of air power in the Empire during the 
first two years of anticolonial revolt took place in the so-called North West Fron-
tier of India in 1919 and 1920, specifically in the areas inhabited by Pakhtuns, 
who had answered the call for help of the Afghan Amir in the “War of Independ-
ence” of 1919 (Afghan denomination). The colonists found out the hard way that 
it was not that easy to bomb the Pakhtun “tribes” there into submission. They 
adapted quickly, shot down several machines, and even the vernacular architec-
ture came to help.
41
But what had started here would be discussed, refined, and settled in the po-
licing of the revolt in Iraq.
42
 This did not happen in an even process. For exam-
ple, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff rightly feared that the havoc creat-
ed would only lead to more unrest with the effect that ground troops had to be 
deployed anyway to restore order: “Air power,” he reasoned, “provides only a 
means of propaganda or an instrument of terrorism.”
43
 The Air Ministry agreed 
somehow; it just wanted to have more of both to be truly successful. Aircraft 
seemingly being everywhere at once, one official explained, were “conveying a 
silent warning.”
44
 “Terror” needed the occasional bloodbath to be effective, but 
surveillance would multiply the panoptic effect as a collateral benefit: “From 
the ground every inhabitant of a village is under the impression that the occu-
von Osten, Colonial Modern: Aesthetics of the Past, Rebellions for the Future (London: 
Black Dog, 2010).
40 
David E. Omissi, Air Power and Colonial Control: The Royal Air Force, 1919–1939 
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 11.
41 
Omissi, 13.
42 
See Satia, “Drones.”
43 
Quoted in Omissi, Air Power and Colonial Control, 28.
44 
Quoted in Satia, “Drones,” 5.

353
drones, bodies, necropolitics: hobbesian shadows over afghan lands
pant of an aeroplane is actually looking at him . . . establishing the impression 
that all their movements are being watched and reported.”
45
One century later, the necropolitical gaze of the drone is no “silent warning,” 
but comes with the menacing insectoid sound of a buzzing wasp, the name of 
the murderous machine in Pakhto, bangana. These drones haunt exactly the 
very same geographies to produce a palimpsest of bombardments, while the 
terrorized population is unable to differentiate between (soft power) intelli-
gence gathering and (deadly) kinetic missions in the first place. Mbembe’s as-
sertion comes to its full right: “Under the conditions of late modern colonial oc-
cupation, surveillance is oriented both inwardly and outwardly, the eye acting 
as weapon, and vice versa.”
46
 Indeed, in the theatre of terror, the target is also 
the audience.
47
Palimpsests and Innovations
Campbell Munro reminds us that the “vertical battlespace” does not extend over 
the whole territory of a state, but only a specific part that echoes the “history of 
these spaces as the ambiguous legal zones of the imperial periphery.”
48
 For the 
vast majority of the last two decades, thousands of drone strikes occurred in the 
Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan, a space of exception, 
“through its constitution as borderlands and battlefields.”
49
 The borderlands lie 
along the infamous Durand Line of 1893, a cartography that divided the lands of 
the “lawless” and “unruly” Pakhtuns. Some found themselves on the now clear-
ly demarcated Afghan territory. But for those who woke up on the British-Indian 
side of the border, the British had created several spatial entities for otherwise 
45 
Satia, 5.
46 
Mbembe, Necropolitics, 81.
47 
Afxentis Afxentiou, “A History of Drones: Moral(e) Bombing and State Terrorism,” Critical 
Studies on Terrorism 11, no. 2 (2018): 314, https://doi.org/10.1080/17539153.2018.1456719.
48 
Campbell Munro, “Mapping the Vertical Battlespace: Towards a Legal Cartography of Aerial 
Sovereignty,” London Review of International Law 2, no. 2 (September 2014): 238, https://
doi.org/10.1093/lril/lru008. See also Campbell Munro, “The Entangled Sovereignties of 
Air Police: Mapping the Boundary of the International and the Imperial,” in “Law and 
Boundaries 2014,” ed. Tomaso Ferrando, special issue, Global Jurist 15, no. 2 (2015): 117–38, 
https://doi.org/10.1515/gj-2014-0019.
49 
Derek Gregory, “Dirty Dancing: Drones and Death in the Borderlands,” in Life in the Age of 
Drone Warfare, eds. Lisa Parks and Caren Kaplan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 29.

354
fahim amir
disenfranchised populations, but with some measure of autonomy to settle their 
disputes according to their own customary law (“Pakhtunwali”). After the parti-
tion of India in 1947, the postcolonial successor state in possession of the Pakh-
tun lands also adopted and maintained this administrative structure, with the 
FATA being “simultaneously inside and outside the modern state.”
50
Benjamin Hopkins has recently argued that the weaponization of Pakhtun ver-
nacular culture was essential for the development of a new form of governing 
that departed from the rule practiced in the colonial heartlands and reserved 
its “savage periphery”: frontier governmentality.
51
 First promulgated in 1872 in 
northwest India for mostly Pakhtun regions as the Frontier Crimes Regulation, 
this new political technology put the settlement of disputes into the hands of 
the Jergas. A Jerga is “a political arrangement for the resolution of local conflict. 
It functions as a sodality—it dissolves when the need for it disappears.”
52
 At the 
same time, this frontier governmentality granted the right to intervene via exec-
utive power to the president and a system of political middlemen in charge of 
state administrative units, thereby creating “a system of governance relying on 
indirect rule and encapsulating frontier tribesmen in what were, in effect, na-
tive reserves.”
53
 Frontier governmentality allowed self-governing, but also justi-
fied punitive and exemplary brutal measures against those who exhibited “sav-
age” behavior. Soon, this excitingly innovative technology was exported to other 
frontier regions of the British Empire and beyond: “Whether they were Apaches 
or Afghans, Zulus, Somalis, or Mapuche, the peoples of the periphery were ruled 
in substantively the same way.”
54
For those living in these legally established borderlands, beyond the newly 
found state of Afghanistan of 1919, the constitution allowed punitive expedi-
tions of collective punishment, mass displacement, and draconian measures, 
whenever deemed appropriate, such as the obscene bombing of Pakhtun villag-
50 
Gregory, “Dirty Dancing,” 32.
51 
Benjamin D. Hopkins, Ruling the Savage Periphery: Frontier Governance and the Making of 
the Modern State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020).
52 
Mohammed Jamil Hanifi, “Editing the Past: Colonial Production of Hegemony Through the 
‘Loya Jerga’ in Afghanistan,” Iranian Studies 37 , no. 2 (June 2004): 297 , https://doi.org/10.1
080/0021086042000268119.
53 
Hopkins, Ruling the Savage Periphery, 10.
54 
Hopkins, 3.

355
drones, bodies, necropolitics: hobbesian shadows over afghan lands
es accused of tax evasion. Until the present day, in dominant discourses Pakh-
tuns are depicted as savage and violent, and their “tribal areas” are presented as 
lawless spaces arrested in a state of archaic freeze,
55
 a persistent colonial char-
acterization possible mainly due to the “absence of Pashtun voices” and coun-
ter-narratives in scholarly literature, as Hanifi argues convincingly.
56
 Critical ac-
counts have demonstrated that these areas in fact show an excess and plethora 
of law.
57
 Sabrina Gilani notes that “despite all the claims about its lawless char-
acter, the Frontier regions are the most regulated of all the spaces” of the border-
lands.
58
 The contingent sovereignties in place here are “no simple suspension of 
the law but rather an operationalization of the violence that is inscribed with-
in (rather than lying beyond) the law.”
59
 The purposefully constructed violent 
geography of exception was the prerequisite on the ground for present-day air 
strikes that morph individual corporality into “temporary micro-cubes” of dead-
ly exception unlatched whenever a targeted individual is located.
60
 The “body 
becomes the battlefield,”
61
 with fleets of drones persistently hovering over Pakh-
tun lands reconfiguring older notions of territorial sovereignty connected to jus 
ad bellum and transforming incursions into national airspace into an enduring 
occupation for a whole population.
62
 The specificity of this new form of aerial 
occupation lies in “its capacity simultaneously to respect and transgress the 
55 
Farooq Yousaf, “The ‘Savage’ Pathan (Pashtun) And the Postcolonial Burden,” Critical 
Studies on Security 9, no. 1 (2021): 36–39, https://doi.org/10.1080/21624887.2021.1904194.
56 
Shah Mahmud Hanifi, “The Pashtun Counter-Narrative,” Middle East Critique 25, no. 4 
(2016): 385–400, https://doi.org/10.1080/19436149.2016.1208354. The different pronuncia-
tion and spelling of Pakhtun and Pashtun for the group of people and Pakhto and Pashto 
for the language is connected to its polycentrism. For the purpose and scope of this text, 
both are used interchangeably, while favoring Pakhtun and Pakhto because the author per-
sonally grew up with these appellations and also values the accompanying polycentrism. 
See also Shah Mahmoud Hanifi, Connecting Histories in Afghanistan: Market Relations and 
State Formation on a Colonial Frontier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 19; Nile 
Green, “Tribe, Diaspora, and Sainthood in Afghan History,” The Journal of Asian Studies 
67, no. 1 (February 2008): 171–211, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021911808000065.
57 
Madiha Tahir, “The Containment Zone,” in Parks and Kaplan, Life in the Age of Drone 
Warfare, 220–40.
58 
Sabrina Gilani, “ ‘Spacing’ Minority Relations: Investigating the Tribal Areas of Pakistan 
Using a Spatio-Historical Method of Analysis,” Social and Legal Studies 24, no. 3 (September 
2015): 371, https://doi.org/10.1177/0964663914564263.
59 
Gregory, “Dirty Dancing,” 30.
60 
Chamayou, Drone Theory, 56.
61 
Chamayou, 56.
62 
Munro, “Mapping the Vertical Battlespace,” 238.

356
fahim amir
principle of territorial sovereignty.”
63
 But it would be hasty to conclude from this 
that the Pakhtuns are naked life in the well-known Agambenian sense, while it 
makes their lives in many ways incredibly hard.
64
The palimpsest of the bombings of Pakhtun lands in Afghanistan and in the 
“Tribal areas” of its neighbor are intrinsically linked to the palimpsest of spe-
cial legal constructions and the palimpsest of epistemic violence that haunts 
this region considered to be a “lawless” and “unruly” borderland by succeed-
ing imperial powers reaching back at least to the Mughal and Persian empires, 
long before the advent of occidental emissaries. The arrival of Mountstuart El-
phinstone, as a representative of the British East India Company at the court 
of the “Kingdom of Caubul” in Peshawar in 1805, began a modern process that 
drew from these older registers of imperial imaginations to map and manipu-
late the polity of this region in terms of geopolitical interests. Elphinstone, who 
was influenced by Johann Gottfried Herder’s ideas and the Edinburgh Enlight-
enment, believed that the Pakhtun “tribes,” with whom he never exchanged a 
single word in direct communication, were contemporary doppelgangers of his 
own ancestors—historical Scottish clans, who just recently had been tamed into 
civilization.
65
 The Elphinstonian episteme first tribalized Pakhtuns and then as-
signed the illogical role of both dominating and undermining the Afghan polity 
to those marked as “Pakhtun tribes,” a colonial imagination that structures the 
overwhelming majority of scholarly works to this day.
66
 Accounts of “scholars, 
diplomatic emissaries, political agents, adventures, and travelers” in the nine-
teenth century turned the region into a colonial trope as they followed British 
colonial discourses and described Pakhtuns as “wild beasts” combining “fasci-
nation, naturalization, and even homo-eroticization, with an underlying con-
63 
Munro, 238.
64 
Gregory, “Dirty Dancing,” 52.
65 
Lynn Zastoupil, “Mountstuart Elphinstone and Indian Education,” in Mountstuart 
Elphinstone in South Asia: Pioneer of British Colonial Rule, ed. Shah Mahmoud Hanifi (New 
York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 174–79; Mountstuart Elphinstone, An Account of the 
Kingdom of Caubul, and Its Dependencies in Persia, Tartary, and India, 2 vols. (Karachi: 
Indus, 1992). Elphinstone’s book was originally published in 1815.
66 
Benjamin D. Hopkins, The Making of Modern Afghanistan (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 
2008), 20; Martin J. Bayly , T aming the Imperial Imagination: Colonial Knowledge, International 
Relations, and the Anglo-Afghan Encounter, 1808–1878 (Cambridge: Cambridge University 
Press, 2016).

357
drones, bodies, necropolitics: hobbesian shadows over afghan lands
cern for control and surveillance.”
67
 The colonial episteme was revived most re-
cently in the shape of the US Department of Defense’s Human Terrain System 
(HTS), a program which “manufactures a highly reified version of Afghan soci-
ety and makes claims of authenticity, often framed within a discourse of ‘tribe’ 
as an unchanging dimension of Afghan society” to help US troops navigate in 
Afghanistan.
68
 Hanifi points out that the post-9/11
surge in attention on Pashtuns and Pashto evident in the US academy and gov-
ernment, mainly as reified colonial British essentializations of Afghanistan, re-
produced a colonial tendency to militarize and weaponize knowledge about other 
cultures. The challenges and failures of the international community evident in 
Afghanistan in no small measure are founded on the fragile intellectual archi-
tecture of nineteenth-century British colonial constructions of knowledge about 
Pashtuns. These understandings were institutionalized in US academia and in-
corporated into the US and other national and international policy-making ma-
chineries.
69
Poltergeists and Discourses
Thomas Hobbes, the “founder of the legal idiom of sovereignty and state ter-
ror,”
70
 can be regarded as the philosophical guardian angel of modern imperial, 
para-, post-, and colonial violence against Afghanistan in general and against 
the Pakhtuns in particular. As a shareholder in the Virginia Company, he was 
well aware of the colonial land grab in Virginia and developed his political zo-
ology of submission and enslavement via the predatory figure of the wolf as the 
emblem of an endless civil war.
71
 In fact, the Pakhtuns’ own non-representa-
tive democracy traditionally rests upon the Jerga, an assembly that every male 
Pakhtun has access to and that settles all disputes consensually without the 
67 
Alessandro Monsutti, “Anthropologizing Afghanistan: Colonial and Postcolonial Encoun-
ters,” Annual Review of Anthropology 42 (October 2013): 271, https://doi.org/10.1146/an-
nurev-anthro-092412-155444.
68 
Benjamin D. Hopkins and Magnus Marsden, Fragments of the Afghan Frontier (London: 
Hurst, 2011), 7.
69 
Hanifi, “Pashtun Counter-Narrative,” 3.
70 
Iris Därmann, Undienlichkeit: Gewaltgeschichte und politische Philosophie (Berlin: Matthes 
und Seitz Berlin, 2020), 80; my translation.
71 
Därmann, 58–80.

358
fahim amir
need for a central state. The Jerga is simultaneously a thoroughly patriarchal 
and entirely democratic Pakhtun art of not being governed. While accounts of 
alleged lawlessness take for granted that civilization and state structures are in-
trinsically co-constitutive, the imposition of the latter has historically been an 
excessively violent affair involving magnitudes of forced labor, resettlements of 
populations, and the enforcement of hierarchical administrative structures. It 
is not the product of a “savage” mind, but perfectly rational that not few have 
preferred not to be transformed into servile subjects of modern statehood, espe-
cially if the state historically did not offer much in exchange. The long-lasting, 
powerful, and effective non-representative democracy of the Pakhtuns gives lie 
to the Hobbesian myth that the “natural state” of stateless societies is a ubiqui-
tous bestial war.
Still Hobbes’s eerie shadow is lurking above many past and present discours-
es about Afghanistan and the Pakhtuns, allowing the mass murder of inno-
cents to be rendered into a footnote in the history of sovereign peacemaking 
and state-building. Reprieve showed that 24 individuals were reported killed or 
targeted multiple times in the FATA. Missed strikes on these men killed 874 peo-
ple, including 142 children. In general, 36 other people, typically unknown and 
unnamed, have been killed as “collateral damage” for every intended target.
72
 
Individuals are targeted with extreme precision, but in a remarkably unsuccess-
ful manner, resulting in a ruthless waste of human life, which is only legitimized 
by the supposed animality, lawlessness, and always already terrorist nature of 
the Pakhtuns.
While the Pakhtun’s Jergas were instrumentalized by British India and its post-
colonial successor in order to disenfranchise them, the Jerga played an essential 
role on the other side of the Durand Line as well: Afghanistan. The British po-
litical agenda for Afghanistan intended to replace a polity based on competing, 
mobile suzerainties and genealogical space with one organized around a single, 
grounded sovereign power ruling over a discrete territorial place and econom-
ically dependent on outside revenue.
73
 Mohammed Jamil and Shah Mahmoud 
72 
“You Never Die Twice: Multiple Kills in the US Drone Program,” Reprieve, December 
2014, 6–8, https://reprieve.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/07/Report_YouNeverDie 
Twice_2014.pdf.
73 
Hanifi, Connecting Histories in Afghanistan.

359
drones, bodies, necropolitics: hobbesian shadows over afghan lands
Hanifi employ the heuristic device of “crypto-colonialism” to understand how 
reified and nationally re-choreographed forms of selected local indigenous 
practices like the Jerga were used as the basis for hegemonic power-building 
attempts in a territorially bound state that was formally independent after the 
bombing of 1919.
74
 Euro-American interventionism at the beginning of the twen-
ty-first century relied heavily on this instrumentalization of Pakhtun culture in 
the name of neoliberal state-building.
75
The “Bonn Agreement” of 2001, for example, called for the convening of a “Loya 
Jerga-ye Ezterari” (Emergency Great Jerga) to be held in Afghanistan in 2002 to 
approve the newly appointed government. Germany had officially justified its 
involvement in the invasion of Afghanistan with the formulation of its then De-
fense Minister that German interests were being defended in the “Hindukusch,” 
thus publicly expunging the memories of its war-ridden population from the Af-
ghan space and establishing itself as the somehow innocent custodian of a ge-
ographical bulwark and the historical “gateway to India.”
76
 The Loya Jerga was 
held as planned in Kabul and convened in a huge tent, produced in Germany, 
to give legitimacy to the Afghan presidency through the seemingly vernacular 
form of consent. This period came to end with the fall of Kabul in August 2021.
The long-term hegemonic impact of colonially produced military and academic 
knowledge about the Pakhtuns on both sides of the Durand Line can be seen as 
a form of “imperial debris,” a notion used by Ann Laura Stoler to describe the 
durability of colonial effects in the present—the perpetual academic, social, po-
litical, and economic formations and effects of imperial domination.
77
 Past and 
new representations of unruly barbaric tribes haunt both Afghan statecraft and 
occidental conceptions of Afghanistan that have enabled intervention in and 
the invasion, occupation, and bombing of the region from the nineteenth cen-
74 
Mohammed Jamil Hanifi and Shah Mahmoud Hanifi, “Crypto-Colonial Independence 
Rituals in Afghanistan,” Afghanistan 4, no. 1 (April 2021): 70–78, https://doi.org/10.3366/
afg.2021.0068.
75 
Hanifi, “Editing the Past,” 295–322.
76 
See also Karoline von Oppen, “From ‘Civilian Power’ to ‘Civilizing Power’: The German 
Mission to the Hindu Kush 2001–2011,” Journal of War and Culture Studies 6, no. 3 (August 
2013): 215–25, https://doi.org/10.1179/1752627213Z.00000000019.  
77 
Ann Laura Stoler, “The Rot Remains: On Ruins and Ruination,” in Imperial Debris: On 
Ruins and Ruination, ed. Ann Laura Stoler (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 1–35.

360
fahim amir
tury to the present.
78
 Similar to the historical precursors of nowadays Austria, 
which historically did not function as a classical colonial power, but was very 
much part of the colonial system, Afghanistan too has never been a full-fledged 
colony, that is why “efforts to taxonomise it and make it intelligible have been 
sporadic and patchy, based on political expediency and colonial caprice.”
79
Perhaps this is the reason for the conspicuous absence of any mention of Af-
ghanistan in Mbembe’s corpus, and can possibly even be attributed to him, for 
the extent to which amateur and ad hoc experts keep appearing out of nowhere, 
only to produce great and banal wisdom, on the grounds of previous knowl-
edge claims connected to imperial engagements, with disastrous effects, is one 
of the biggest problems of Afghanistan. It remains remarkable, however, that 
his necropolitical reflections appeared just after Afghanistan had been declared 
a necropolis of history with the trope “graveyard of empires.” There is hardly an 
occidental account of Afghanistan over the last two decades to be found where 
this figure is not invoked as timelessly self-evident. In reality, however, the trope 
is of surprisingly recent origin: an article in Foreign Affairs from 2001.
80
 The fig-
ure produces an extreme otherness of Afghanistan by locking it into a timeless 
container of atavistic “tribes” and closing off possible futures.
81
 In the midst of 
occidental interventionism, under-complex myths gain epistemic status with 
dizzying speed.
82
 At the same time, this trope also has an empowering and com-
forting function for many Afghans, who choose to inhabit it, by counterpointing 
the long history of violent influence (Persia, the Mughal Empire, Britain, the So-
viet Union, NATO, the US).
The academic discipline of postcolonial studies has been shamefully silent 
when it comes to Afghanistan, a disturbing fact that is most likely due to the 
78 
Nivi Manchanda, Imagining Afghanistan: The History and Politics of Imperial Knowledge 
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
79 
Manchanda, Imagining Afghanistan, 8.
80 
Nivi Manchanda, “The Graveyard of Empires: Haunting, Amnesia and Afghanistan’s 
Construction as a Burial Site,” Middle East Critique 28, no. 3 (2019): 309, https://doi.org/10. 
1080/19436149.2019.1633745.
81 
Manchanda, “The Graveyard of Empires,” 307–20.
82 
Florian P. Kühn, “Afghanistan and the ‘Graveyard of Empires’: Blumenberg, Under-
Complex Analogy and Basic Myths in International Politics,” in Myth and Narrative in 
International Politics: Interpretive Approaches to the Study of IR, ed. Berit Bliesemann de 
Guevara (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 147–72.

361
drones, bodies, necropolitics: hobbesian shadows over afghan lands
institutional linkages, linguistic corridors, entangled histories, and negotiat-
ed epistemologies between “full” colonies and their former masters. Mbembe’s 
“semiotic hermeneutics”
83
 of the postcolony, on the other hand, may open up-
important ways to think about the politics of death in today’s world and its ge-
nealogies; at the same time, one wonders if his staging of the plantation, the 
slavery system, the concentration camp, and the settler colony as master mod-
els of necropolitics is able to fully account for the reality of paracolonized plac-
es like Afghanistan or the many ways violence is trafficked today. For example, 
Mbembe discusses injury as a crucial element of enslavement, the slave is “kept 
alive, but in a state of injury.”
84
 Forty years of Western and Eastern intervention-
ist wars have turned enormous parts of Afghanistan into a landscape “that will 
continue to kill, maim, hurt, and obstruct Afghan lives, human and nonhuman, 
long after the war has ended.”
85
 It is estimated that Afghanistan now has a pop-
ulation of three million disabled, about 10 percent of the population, including 
mental and physical disabilities among both civilians and security forces.
86
 In 
this context, Jasbir K. Puar questions whether the right to maim can be easily po-
sitioned in Mbembe’s dualism of life and death: “Maiming is a practice that es-
capes definition within both legal and biopolitical or necropolitical frameworks 
because it does not proceed through making live, making die, letting live, or 
letting die.”
87
Simultaneously with the attack on Afghanistan, the popular rise of its desig-
nation as a necropolis, and the seminal publication of “Necropolitics” in 2003, 
a seemingly unconnected figure began its triumphant march—innovation. This 
apparently innocent term only gained ubiquitous acceptance after 9/11, argues 
Jill Lepore: “The idea of innovation is the idea of progress stripped of the aspira-
tions of the Enlightenment, scrubbed clean of the horrors of the twentieth cen-
83 
M. John Lamola, “Breaking the Gridlock of the African Postcolonial Self-Imagination: 
Marx against Mbembe,” Angelaki 24, no. 2 (April 2019): 49, https://doi.org/10.1080/096972
5X.2019.1574077.
84 
Mbembe, Necropolitics, 75.
85 
Fahim Amir, “Notes toward a Forensic Ecology of Afghanistan,” in Is It Morning for You 
Yet? 58th Carnegie International (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2022), 73.
86 
Rod Nordland, “Maimed Defending Afghanistan, Then Neglected,” New York Times, May 
2, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/03/world/middleeast/maimed-defending-af -
ghanistan-then-neglected.html.
87 
Jasbir K. Puar, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (Durham: Duke University 
Press, 2017), 137.

362
fahim amir
tury, and relieved of its critics.”
88
 Tracing the relationship between these terms 
is beyond the scope of this article, but without a doubt, after the debacle of the 
war that has officially just ended, Afghans have at least one, rather non-innova-
tive, right on their side vis-à-vis both the vengeful and the well-meaning hordes 
of armies, NGOs, corporations, intelligence agencies, and advisors that have 
overrun the country over the past two decades, only to ingloriously disappear 
again: the right to shame.
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