ABSTRACT
During the writing of this chapter, a massive vinyl poster showing the photographed face of a little Pakistani girl who lost both parents and two young siblings in a drone attack in 2010 was installed, facing the sky, among mud huts and farms in the heavily bombed Khyber Pakhtunkhwa tribal region of Pakistan, bordering Afghanistan.1 The image was laid out in the field long enough for it to be captured by satellites, and appear as a part of the landscape on online mapping sites. Now, when drone operators preside over deadly missile attacks from thousands of miles away, they see on their screens a child’s face, rather than grainy video images of their casualties-images that give the sense of an insect being crushed, referred to in military slang as “bug splat.” The poster was installed by #NotABugSplat, a Pakistani/US artist collective hoping to instigate dialogue on and awareness of the massive numbers of civilian casualties in Pakistan.2
