On September 4, 2013, as the war drums beat loud in Washington and the crowds that had come to the city for the fiftieth anniversary of the march on Washington had become a memory, Nation columnist Michelle Alexander published an essay, “Breaking my Silence.” The piece owned up to the culpability of quiet that pervades the American Left when it comes to recognizing the connections between insidious racism at home and martial imperialism abroad. In the piece, Alexander, noted author of “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” takes personal ownership for “staying in her lane”; for failing to speak out on “the use of drones abroad in a “war on terror” and to “connect the dots” between NSA spying on millions of Americans; for the labeling of mosques as “terrorist organizations”; and for the FBI and COINTELPRO programs of the sixties and seventies, which placed the Civil Rights Movement  under constant surveillance, infiltrated their organizations, and assassinated their leaders.

As a Pakistani American writer and human rights activist, inhabiting the intersection between American remote-controlled wars and uncounted Pakistani casualties, I am grateful for Michelle Alexander’s words. The common connections between the dehumanization that allows for the incarceration of millions of African-American men and the new vocabulary of precision and humanitarianism that has been attached to imperial war are indeed many. Both use the weight of moral righteousness to create two-pronged chains of justification: the first insists that the practice is necessary, and the second pronounces it good for those on whom it is being inflicted. As per this recipe, the imprisonment of African-American men — the lurking, drug peddling demons of peaceful American neighborhoods, it says — is crucial to the safety of all but is also ultimately rehabilitative for these wayward men who have fallen into lives of crime.

Just as mass incarceration uses the gloss of rehabilitation to hide the realities of social control, military intervention has appropriated the language of humanitarianism to disguise imperialist motives. In Afghanistan it was the women being so sordidly oppressed by the Taliban; in Iraq it was a the unstoppable bullying of a dictator; and now in Syria it is the rows of children so cruelly gassed by their own President. Just as an African-American man convicted by a crime and condemned to a sentence becomes invisible, so do the populations of these countries once interventions have actually happened and occupations are underway. The individuality of the African-American man ceases to exist post conviction, as does the plight of the Iraqi and the Afghani once their countries are occupied and attentions drift elsewhere. The cruelties that are perpetrated before American interventions exist loud and blaring and demanding of moral outrage; the ones inflicted by American forces after intervention do not exist at all.