The Drone That Fell From the Sky: What a Busted Robot Airplane Tells Us About the American Empire in 2012 and Beyond

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It’s 10 pm.  Do you know where your drone is?

Oh, the confusion of it all!  The U.S. military now insists it was deeply befuddled when it claimed that a super-secret advanced RQ-170 Sentinel drone (aka "the beast of Kandahar") which fell into Iranian hands on December 4th -- evidently while surveying suspected nuclear sites -- was lost patrolling the Afghan border.  The military, said a spokesman, "did not have a good understanding of what was going on because it was a CIA mission."

Whatever happened, that lost drone story hit the headlines in a way that allowed everyone their Warholian 15 minutes of fame.  Dick Cheney went on the air to insist that President Obama should have sent Air Force planes into Iran to blow the grounded Sentinel to bits.  (Who cares about sparking off hostilities or sending global oil prices skyrocketing?)  President Obamaformally asked for the plane’s return, but somehow didn’t have high hopes that the Iranians would comply.  (Check out Gary Powers and the downing of his U-2 spy plane over Russia in 1960 for a precedent.)  Defense Secretary Leon Panetta swore we would never stop our Afghan-based drone surveillance of Iran. Afghan President Hamid Karzai asked that his country be kept out of any “adversarial relations between Iran and the United States.”  (Fat chance!) The Iranians, who displayed the plane, insisted proudly that they had hacked into it, “spoofed” its navigational controls, and brought it in for a relatively soft landing.  And Kim Kardashian... oops, wrong story.

All in all, it was a little robotic circus.  All three rings’ worth.  Meanwhile, drones weren’t having such a good time of it elsewhere either, even if no one was paying much attention.  The half-hidden drone story of the week wasn’t on the Iranian side of the Afghan border, but on the Pakistani side.  There, in that country’s tribal borderlands, the CIA had for years been conducting an escalating drone air campaign, hundreds of strikes, often several a week, against suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban militants.  In the wake of an “incident” in which U.S. air strikes killed 24 Pakistani troops at two border posts, however, the Pakistanis closed the border to U.S. supplies for the Afghan war (significantly increasing the cost of that conflict), kicked the U.S. out of Shamsi air base, the CIA’s main drone facility in the country, and threatened to shoot down any U.S. drones over its territory.  In the process, they seem to have forced the Obama administration to shut down its covert drone air campaign.  At this point, there have been no drone attacks for almost a month.

When he was still CIA Director, Leon Panetta termed the Agency's drone campaign the “only game in town.” Now it’s “on hold.”  ("There is concern that another hit [by the drones] will push US-Pakistan relations past the point of no return," one official told The Long War Journal. "We don't know how far we can push them [Pakistan], how much more they are willing to tolerate.")  After those hundreds of strikes and significant civilian casualties, which have helped turn the Pakistani public against the U.S. -- according to a recent poll, a staggering97% of Pakistanis oppose the attacks -- it’s a stunning reversal, however temporary and little noted.