[p2p-research] Drone hacking

[Andy Robinson]

The thing about asymmetrical technologies is, they aren't just used by
takfiri/jihadi groups, they can be used by anyone who is at a systemic
disadvantage - whether it's the Chinese government, the Vietcong, the
Zapatistas, eco-warriors, or a whole range of quite nasty people, even
neo-Nazis if they wanted to.  But the concentrated-power technologies can
only be used by people in control of massive militarised states, and the use
of these technologies disempowers all the small and weak groups (the
overwhelming majority of the world).  Sure, it might disempower some quite
nasty people, but it disempowers a lot of good people as well.  And
sometimes the gain in power of nasty people from asymmetrical weapons will
also ultimately rebound favourably for the nice people.  And ultimately
would rebound on the nasty people should they ever consolidate power - look
at the effect of the Internet on protest in Iran for example.

The sustainability and social basis of takfiri groups, and of other groups
which claim a basis in Islam, is questionable and widely variant.  But, it
needs to be made clear that situations in peripheral regions fighting
American empire are *very, very complex*.  It is not at all as simple as a
few bad people who want to oppress women and have a definite ideology.  In
Afghanistan and Somalia, a lot of it is about conflicts between clans or
ethnic groups.  Some of it is about the assertion of everyday forms of
informal power, against the centralised state.  Some of it is about young
socially-excluded men finding a social niche through military mobilisation.
Some of it is straightforward anti-occupier hostility.  To take a few
examples.  The serious scholars on Somalia are saying the Islamic Courts
Union is not really a 'fundamentalist' force at all, but a reassertion by
clan elders against warlords and foreign-backed regimes.  The Taleban today
is principally a Pashtun nationalist organisation.  Hamas, which has
recently pledged to stay out of people's private lives, gained support
mainly as a group able to provide welfare services and continue resistance
in a context of massive Israeli violence.  In Turkey the so-called
'fundamentalists' have turned out to be a democratising force in what was
previously a monolithic army-state.

There is no possibility of the whole world living like America (or Sweden
for that matter) - American resource overconsumption is financed by unequal
resource flows which require the maintenance of hyperexploitation and
poverty elsewhere, not to mention resource consumption which is
unsustainable at present and would be drastically more so if replicated
elsewhere.  So the question is not "would you or I rather live in modern
America or under a Taleban dictatorship" but a more ambiguous kind of
question...  is it better to live under a dictatorship like Saddam's or a US
occupation... is it better to live in Cuba or under a US-backed dictatorship
somewhere like Haiti...  is it better to live in Somalia under the 'Islamic
courts union' who are mainly clan elders, or under a foreign-backed regime
which rules by force and with no local consent at all... is it better to
live under the Shah of Iran with his feared SAVAK secret police, or under
Khomeini with the Revolutionary Guards...  or between the Vietcong and
dictatorships such as those of Diem and Thieu.  In any case, it is not
really relevant in which country you as a properly socialised American would
prefer, but which an Afghan, Iraqi, Iranian or Somali would prefer...  and
this is by no means clear, and would doubtless vary depending on
clan/ethnicity and social class, but where there is evidence, it seems to
support the anti-US option in all these cases.  In surveys, most Iraqis say
they were better off under Saddam, and millions have voted with their feet -
the refugee exodus is greater today than under Saddam.  Iraqi election
results suggest they also think an independent Islamic-based regime would be
better than a US occupation.  The Taleban and the Islamic Courts Union were
widely welcomed at first, despite opposition to certain repressive
policies.  The Iranian conservatives retain a definite electoral
constituency, even though large sectors of Iranian society are seeking
reform (note that Iranian reformers *are not* trying to turn Iran into
America).  I don't want to defend any of these 'lesser evils' as they are
seen by locals, but I would even less want to support what locals see as the
greater evil, because of preferences constructed from outside their
situation, or because of some imaginary claim to be able to speak for others
based on simply observing their experiences.

I would also add, firstly, that there are some extreme kinds of
dehumanisation and brutality which are peculiarly American, and which would
not be tolerated by people like the Afghans and Somalis - high-tech forms of
torture such as the Supermax isolation regimes for example, and the ability
of police to murder members of ethnic minorities without retaliatory
violence.  The peculiarly modern-statist cruelties are on the one hand,
those of prolonged but ruined life, keeping-alive in constant misery (in
distinction from the brutality of rapid pain and death), and on the other,
brutal asymmetries which add insult to injury by not only violating but
disempowering any response.  The gated cores of modern societies also
increasingly impose the risk of extreme indignities as part of 'normal'
procedure - the requirement to submit to police searches for instance, in an
extreme case even cavity searches (rape by fisting), the requirement to be
under constant surveillance, the threat of indefinite extrajudicial
imprisonment ("lockdowns"), and de facto martial law whenever a major leader
is in town.  Are these *persistent, everyday *cruelties and indignities
really less than those of regimes such as the Taleban, which employ short
pain and death as *exceptional* forms of terror?  We can refer to the
Taleban atrocity of abducting thousands of Hazara women as sex slaves - but
we can also refer to the fact that rape by border guards is so frequent that
women migrants take contraceptives before attempting a crossing to America,
or the frequency of sexual abuse at US prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan, or
the deliberate use of sexual predation as part of regimes of terror in US
prisons.  The difference is that *America's cruelty is well-hidden and
discursively managed, whereas Taleban cruelty is taken in snapshot at its
worst and displayed as typical, definitive, 'unmanageable'.*

We also need to remember that the kind of societies America seeks to
dominate and occupy are societies where what Kropotkin calls the 'social
principle' is alive and well, and the power of the dominant statists (be
they Stalinists, Taleban or petty despots) is correspondingly weakened.
These are the kinds of societies where the dominant group can prohibit
something with minimum effect (up to half Pashtun men have had same-sex
experiences in spite of the Taleban prohibition for example) - whereas in
America, every little byelaw risks ruining lives.  Further, the degree of
atomisation in (much of) America would not be tolerated, because of values
of dignity and affinity.  People have to cope with risks of natural
disaster, seasonal scarcity, war and feuding, but would not experience such
things alone - the fate of clan-groups is tightly bound up together, so
people may never feel as *alone* as in somewhere like America.

TBH the point is moot in any case - the maximal option is the decentring of
power to open-ended affinity-networks, and this aim will be favoured by the
strengthening of asymmetrical power and the weakening of concentrated kinds
of warfare.  There is then the additional question of how to favour the
nicer kinds of networks over the nasty ones.  The means to do this is most
definitely not to support the actions of nasty states against nasty
networks.

PS:  America is NOT able to win militarily in contexts such as Somalia,
Afghanistan, and even Iraq, because the pool of new insurgents is constant,
and the insurgents don't have to win - they simply have to persist.  To
"win", America needs to pacify the country.  And it does not achieve this
goal by killing large numbers of insurgents, because the insurgency is
self-reproducing.  What's more, the more the war goes on, the more the
morale of insurgents increases, and the more the morale of America's
support-base decreases.  The only way America can "win" is by stepping back
from the reconstruction of society to the making-safe of enemies through
patronage and bribery.  America has reduced violence in Iraq (still not to a
low enough level for refugees to return!) mainly by in a sense, *accepting
defeat* - ceding local power to militias with goals vastly different from
America's, in effect buying them off with patronage and recognition in
return for the *appearance* of stability.  They take "al-Qaeda in Iraq" and
"Islamic State in Iraq", give them official posts, bribe them, and rename
them as the "Awakening Councils" - thus suddenly, defeat becomes victory.
They are trying the same thing in Afghanistan.  I doubt it will work.  If it
does, it will just be the Taleban brought inside the fictive Afghan 'state',
not at all their defeat.
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