Distance, detachment, and division: a response to “Midnight’s victims”

Abstract

ABSTRACT This response to Derek Gregory’s essay “Midnight’s victims” focuses on ordinariness and the everyday to address the ways in which ordinary and everyday activities were continually misread and misunderstood by the US through foundational practices of distance and detachment over the course of the nearly 20-year occupation. The geopolitical entanglements of the US in Afghanistan, such as weaponising and demarcating gender roles and relations for geopolitical purposes and the ineffectiveness of revenge as a driver of intervention, are identified as other aspects of US failures that require further scrutiny. Additionally, distance and detachment were endemic to the quantitative assessments, such as sorting combatants from civilians or applying the military principle of proportionality, and the subsequent faulty identification of, and decisions to kill, civilians incorrectly suspected of insurgent activity.