The Network - Jason Elliot [70]
Then comes the near-miraculous moment when the small square at the bottom of the screen is suddenly expanded, and we’re looking at live video from a Predator’s nose. Spinning numbers at the edge of the screen give the aircraft’s position, heading and the time. I imagine the images will be still ones, but the video is as good as television and the impression is almost supernatural.
We are in the south-east of the country, near the border of Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas and what the British used to call the North-West Frontier. To the Pakistanis, it’s Waziristan; to the Pashtuns, for whom the border has never really existed since the British imposed it a hundred years earlier, it’s still Afghanistan.
The Predator is circling silently above a potential target designated by a tracking team on the ground. It’s a mud-walled compound typical of the region, and the feed shows several parked vehicles in a courtyard and a single man emerging from a doorway. The angle of view is not from directly overhead so unlike an aerial photograph we can see the place in two dimensions. The man is wearing Afghan clothes and, by the looks of it, a waistcoat, but no turban. For a few moments all our eyes are on him. Then he stoops down and reaches for something on the ground. The camera is almost still. It’s surreal. From 7,000 miles away, we’re watching a Pashtun housekeeper sweep the dust from the doorway of his house.
A few moments later he stands up and runs across the courtyard towards the entrance gates. Behind them, two squat Russian jeeps have pulled up, and I imagine the characteristic single-tone horn of the forward jeep that has interrupted the housekeeper’s task. I imagine the metallic clang of the gate as it sweeps open and the smell of dust and diesel as the jeeps enter the courtyard and park. Several men descend from the vehicles and are joined by two others from inside the house, one of whom is steadying his turban on his head as he comes out. They greet their visitors in turn. We can even see the fluttering of the untied ends of their turbans in the wind. Even at this distance the formalised solemnity of their gestures is somehow communicated, and I can almost hear the ritual exchange of blessings as they embrace, touching chests rather than shaking hands, in the timeless Afghan fashion. They carry no weapons. Who are these men? Traders? Government members? Brothers or friends? Terrorists? I will never ever know.
We hear the distorted electronic voice of the Predator pilot over the loudspeakers as he receives instructions from two men wearing headsets sitting at the back of the room at computers. They are searching for a single man in a country the other side of the world, hoping to encounter the visual signature by which bin Laden has now become known: a convoy of Land Cruisers and armed bodyguards. I’m filled with a feeling akin to awe at the effort and technological genius that makes this spectacle possible. It is matched only by private concern at the fragility of the search, which will only ever be as reliable as the informers inside the country providing the likely targets. I imagine the temptation faced by an Afghan informer, seduced by bagfuls of hundred-dollar bills, to select targets merely to please his handlers because he knows this is what is expected of him and guarantees the next instalment. But I dare not express my cynicism.
For several hours we stare at the images as they