War misguidance: Visualizing quagmire in the US War in Afghanistan

Abstract

This article argues that the US War in Afghanistan, given its status as a Long War, must contend with a specific visual form that threatens to disclose that the war is an irreversible failure: the ‘visual quagmire’. A visual quagmire is a visualization of a nation’s catastrophic, self-inflicted entanglement in war. In ‘Cluster fuck: The forcible frame in Errol Morris’s Standard Operating Procedure’ (2010), Linda Williams argues that the ‘cluster fuck’ is the ‘most eloquent figure of the American entanglement in Iraq’. This essay proposes that the ‘visual quagmire’ is an eloquent figure of the failure of America’s networked war in Afghanistan. To support this, this essay analyzes the widely criticized PowerPoint slide depicting counterinsurgency dynamics in Afghanistan, which was presented to the then Commander of US Forces in Afghanistan, General Stanley A McChrystal in summer 2009. Elaborating on the form of the ‘visual quagmire’ underscores the importance of theorizing the processual emergence of quagmires and indexes that US military forces are responsible for strategic misguidance through how they visualize war.