“I NO LONGER LOVE BLUE SKIES”: THE BELLIPHONICS OF LOITERING AND THE SONIC AFTERLIFE OF DRONE WARFARE IN WAZIRISTAN

Abstract

On 29 October 2013, thirteen-year-old Zubair Ur Rehman told members of the United States Congress that he preferred grey skies because the drones did not fly when the sky was grey. This paper reads that statement as a situated analysis of how prolonged aerial surveillance altered the sensory conditions of ordinary life in North and South Waziristan. Existing scholarship has examined the legal, strategic, political, and psychological consequences of the U.S. drone campaign in Pakistan, while sound studies has developed accounts of wartime listening in other conflicts. The paper brings these literatures into conversation through a qualitative reading of a public archive comprising human-rights investigations, testimony, journalism, Pashto verse, memoir, documentary film, and artistic intervention. It argues that the campaign produced a distinctive acoustic regime in which a relatively quiet, persistent sound was continuously associated with the possibility of lethal action without reliably indicating when that action would occur. I call this regime the belliphonics of loitering. The argument then follows the sensory habits formed under that regime beyond the period of U.S. strikes, defining their persistence as a sonic afterlife. The paper does not claim that the archive represents all residents of Waziristan. Rather, it treats publicly recorded testimony and vernacular materials as evidence of situated knowledge subordinated to debates over casualty counts and political blowbacks. Recent reporting on suspected quadcopter incidents in Waziristan suggests that this acoustic history may not be simply retrospective: a newer low-altitude drone ecology appears to be layered onto the older one.