The world will probably never know what motivated
those particular hijackers who flew planes into those particular
American buildings. They were not glory boys. They left no suicide
notes, no political messages; no organization has claimed credit
for the attacks. All we know is that their belief in what they
were doing outstripped the natural human instinct for survival,
or any desire to be remembered. It's almost as though they could
not scale down the enormity of their rage to anything smaller
than their deeds.
The US government, and no doubt governments
all over the world, will use the climate of war as an excuse
to curtail civil liberties, deny free speech, lay off workers,
harass ethnic and religious minorities, cut back on public spending
and divert huge amounts of money to the defense industry. To
what purpose? President Bush can no more "rid the world
of evil-doers" than he can stock it with saints. It's absurd
for the US government to even toy with the notion that it can
stamp out terrorism with more violence and oppression. Terrorism
is the symptom, not the disease. Terrorism has no country. It's
transnational, as global an enterprise as Coke or Pepsi or Nike.
At the first sign of trouble, terrorists can pull up stakes and
move their "factories" from country to country in search
of a better deal. Just like the multi-nationals.
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In the aftermath of the unconscionable September 11 suicide
attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, an American
newscaster said: "Good and evil rarely manifest themselves
as clearly as they did last Tuesday. People who we don't know
massacred people who we do. And they did so with contemptuous
glee." Then he broke down and wept.
Here's the rub: America is at war against people it doesn't
know, because they don't appear much on TV. Before it has properly
identified or even begun to comprehend the nature of its enemy,
the US government has, in a rush of publicity and embarrassing
rhetoric, cobbled together an "international coalition against
terror", mobilized its army, its air force, its navy and
its media, and committed them to battle.
The trouble is that once America goes off to war, it can't
very well return without having fought one. If it doesn't find
its enemy, for the sake of the enraged folks back home, it will
have to manufacture one. Once war begins, it will develop a momentum,
a logic and a justification of its own, and we'll lose sight
of why it's being fought in the first place.
What we're witnessing here is the spectacle of the world's
most powerful country reaching reflexively, angrily, for an old
instinct to fight a new kind of war. Suddenly, when it comes
to defending itself, America's streamlined warships, cruise missiles
and F-16 jets look like obsolete, lumbering things. As deterrence,
its arsenal of nuclear bombs is no longer worth its weight in
scrap. Box-cutters, penknives, and cold anger are the weapons
with which the wars of the new century will be waged. Anger is
the lock pick. It slips through customs unnoticed. Doesn't show
up in baggage checks.
Who is America fighting? On September 20, the FBI said that
it had doubts about the identities of some of the hijackers.
On the same day President George Bush said, "We know exactly
who these people are and which governments are supporting them."
It sounds as though the president knows something that the FBI
and the American public don't.
In his September 20 address to the US Congress, President
Bush called the enemies of America "enemies of freedom".
"Americans are asking, 'Why do they hate us?' " he
said. "They hate our freedoms - our freedom of religion,
our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree
with each other." People are being asked to make two leaps
of faith here. First, to assume that The Enemy is who the US
government says it is, even though it has no substantial evidence
to support that claim. And second, to assume that The Enemy's
motives are what the US government says they are, and there's
nothing to support that either.
For strategic, military and economic reasons, it is vital
for the US government to persuade its public that their commitment
to freedom and democracy and the American Way of Life is under
attack. In the current atmosphere of grief, outrage and anger,
it's an easy notion to peddle. However, if that were true, it's
reasonable to wonder why the symbols of America's economic and
military dominance - the World Trade Center and the Pentagon
- were chosen as the targets of the attacks. Why not the Statue
of Liberty? Could it be that the stygian anger that led to the
attacks has its taproot not in American freedom and democracy,
but in the US government's record of commitment and support to
exactly the opposite things - to military and economic terrorism,
insurgency, military dictatorship, religious bigotry and unimaginable
genocide (outside America)? It must be hard for ordinary Americans,
so recently bereaved, to look up at the world with their eyes
full of tears and encounter what might appear to them to be indifference.
It isn't indifference. It's just augury. An absence of surprise.
The tired wisdom of knowing that what goes around eventually
comes around. American people ought to know that it is not them
but their government's policies that are so hated. They can't
possibly doubt that they themselves, their extraordinary musicians,
their writers, their actors, their spectacular sportsmen and
their cinema, are universally welcomed. All of us have been moved
by the courage and grace shown by firefighters, rescue workers
and ordinary office staff in the days since the attacks.
America's grief at what happened has been immense and immensely
public. It would be grotesque to expect it to calibrate or modulate
its anguish. However, it will be a pity if, instead of using
this as an opportunity to try to understand why September 11
happened, Americans use it as an opportunity to usurp the whole
world's sorrow to mourn and avenge only their own. Because then
it falls to the rest of us to ask the hard questions and say
the harsh things. And for our pains, for our bad timing, we will
be disliked, ignored and perhaps eventually silenced.
The world will probably never know what motivated those particular
hijackers who flew planes into those particular American buildings.
They were not glory boys. They left no suicide notes, no political
messages; no organization has claimed credit for the attacks.
All we know is that their belief in what they were doing outstripped
the natural human instinct for survival, or any desire to be
remembered. It's almost as though they could not scale down the
enormity of their rage to anything smaller than their deeds.
And what they did has blown a hole in the world as we knew it.
In the absence of information, politicians, political commentators
and writers (like myself) will invest the act with their own
politics, with their own interpretations. This speculation, this
analysis of the political climate in which the attacks took place,
can only be a good thing.
But war is looming large. Whatever remains to be said must
be said quickly. Before America places itself at the helm of
the "international coalition against terror", before
it invites (and coerces) countries to actively participate in
its almost godlike mission - called Operation Infinite Justice
until it was pointed out that this could be seen as an insult
to Muslims, who believe that only Allah can mete out infinite
justice, and was renamed Operation Enduring Freedom- it would
help if some small clarifications are made. For example, Infinite
Justice/Enduring Freedom for whom? Is this America's war against
terror in America or against terror in general? What exactly
is being avenged here? Is it the tragic loss of almost 7,000
lives, the gutting of five million square feet of office space
in Manhattan, the destruction of a section of the Pentagon, the
loss of several hundreds of thousands of jobs, the bankruptcy
of some airline companies and the dip in the New York Stock Exchange?
Or is it more than that? In 1996, Madeleine Albright, then the
US secretary of state, was asked on national television what
she felt about the fact that 500,000 Iraqi children had died
as a result of US economic sanctions. She replied that it was
"a very hard choice", but that, all things considered,
"we think the price is worth it". Albright never lost
her job for saying this. She continued to travel the world representing
the views and aspirations of the US government. More pertinently,
the sanctions against Iraq remain in place. Children continue
to die.
So here we have it. The equivocating distinction between civilization
and savagery, between the "massacre of innocent people"
or, if you like, "a clash of civilizations" and "collateral
damage". The sophistry and fastidious algebra of infinite
justice. How many dead Iraqis will it take to make the world
a better place? How many dead Afghans for every dead American?
How many dead women and children for every dead man? How many
dead mojahedin for each dead investment banker? As we watch mesmerized,
Operation Enduring Freedom unfolds on TV monitors across the
world. A coalition of the world's superpowers is closing in on
Afghanistan, one of the poorest, most ravaged, war-torn countries
in the world, whose ruling Taliban government is sheltering Osama
bin Laden, the man being held responsible for the September 11
attacks.
The only thing in Afghanistan that could possibly count as
collateral value is its citizenry. (Among them, half a million
maimed orphans.There are accounts of hobbling stampedes that
occur when artificial limbs are airdropped into remote, inaccessible
villages.) Afghanistan's economy is in a shambles. In fact, the
problem for an invading army is that Afghanistan has no conventional
coordinates or signposts to plot on a military map - no big cities,
no highways, no industrial complexes, no water treatment plants.
Farms have been turned into mass graves. The countryside is littered
with land mines - 10 million is the most recent estimate. The
American army would first have to clear the mines and build roads
in order to take its soldiers in.
Fearing an attack from America, one million citizens have
fled from their homes and arrived at the border between Pakistan
and Afghanistan. The UN estimates that there are eight million
Afghan citizens who need emergency aid. As supplies run out -
food and aid agencies have been asked to leave - the BBC reports
that one of the worst humanitarian disasters of recent times
has begun to unfold. Witness the infinite justice of the new
century. Civilians starving to death while they're waiting to
be killed.
In America there has been rough talk of "bombing Afghanistan
back to the stone age". Someone please break the news that
Afghanistan is already there. And if it's any consolation, America
played no small part in helping it on its way. The American people
may be a little fuzzy about where exactly Afghanistan is (we
hear reports that there's a run on maps of the country), but
the US government and Afghanistan are old friends.
In 1979, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the CIA
and Pakistan's ISI (Inter Services Intelligence) launched the
largest covert operation in the history of the CIA. Their purpose
was to harness the energy of Afghan resistance to the Soviets
and expand it into a holy war, an Islamic jihad, which would
turn Muslim countries within the Soviet Union against the communist
regime and eventually destabilize it. When it began, it was meant
to be the Soviet Union's Vietnam. It turned out to be much more
than that. Over the years, through the ISI, the CIA funded and
recruited almost 100,000 radical mojahedin from 40 Islamic countries
as soldiers for America's proxy war. The rank and file of the
mojahedin were unaware that their jihad was actually being fought
on behalf of Uncle Sam. (The irony is that America was equally
unaware that it was financing a future war against itself.)
In 1989, after being bloodied by 10 years of relentless conflict,
the Russians withdrew, leaving behind a civilization reduced
to rubble.
Civil war in Afghanistan raged on. The jihad spread to Chechnya,
Kosovo and eventually to Kashmir. The CIA continued to pour in
money and military equipment, but the overheads had become immense,
and more money was needed. The mojahedin ordered farmers to plant
opium as a "revolutionary tax". The ISI set up hundreds
of heroin laboratories across Afghanistan. Within two years of
the CIA's arrival, the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderland had become
the biggest producer of heroin in the world, and the single biggest
source of the heroin on American streets. The annual profits,
said to be between $100 billion and $200 billion were plowed
back into training and arming militants.
In 1995, the Taliban - then a marginal sect of dangerous,
hardline fundamentalists - fought its way to power in Afghanistan.
It was funded by the ISI, that old cohort of the CIA, and supported
by many political parties in Pakistan. The Taliban unleashed
a regime of terror. Its first victims were its own people, particularly
women. It closed down girls' schools, dismissed women from government
jobs, and enforced sharia laws under which women deemed to be
"immoral" are stoned to death, and widows guilty of
being adulterous are buried alive. Given the Taliban government's
human rights track record, it seems unlikely that it will in
any way be intimidated or swerved from its purpose by the prospect
of war, or the threat to the lives of its civilians.
After all that has happened, can there be anything more ironic
than Russia and America joining hands to re-destroy Afghanistan?
The question is, can you destroy destruction? Dropping more bombs
on Afghanistan will only shuffle the rubble, scramble some old
graves and disturb the dead.
The desolate landscape of Afghanistan was the burial ground
of Soviet communism and the springboard of a unipolar world dominated
by America. It made the space for neocapitalism and corporate
globalization, again dominated by America. And now Afghanistan
is poised to become the graveyard for the unlikely soldiers who
fought and won this war for America.
And what of America's trusted ally? Pakistan too has suffered
enormously. The US government has not been shy of supporting
military dictators who have blocked the idea of democracy from
taking root in the country. Before the CIA arrived, there was
a small rural market for opium in Pakistan. Between 1979 and
1985, the number of heroin addicts grew from zero to one-and-a-half
million. Even before September 11, there were three million Afghan
refugees living in tented camps along the border. Pakistan's
economy is crumbling. Sectarian violence, globalizations structural
adjustment programs and drug lords are tearing the country to
pieces. Set up to fight the Soviets, the terrorist training centers
and madrasahs, sown like dragon's teeth across the country, produced
fundamentalists with tremendous popular appeal within Pakistan
itself. The Taliban, which the Pakistan government has sup ported,
funded and propped up for years, has material and strategic alliances
with Pakistan's own political parties.
Now the US government is asking (asking?) Pakistan to garotte
the pet it has hand-reared in its backyard for so many years.
President Musharraf, having pledged his support to the US, could
well find he has something resembling civil war on his hands.
India, thanks in part to its geography, and in part to the
vision of its former leaders, has so far been fortunate enough
to be left out of this Great Game. Had it been drawn in, it's
more than likely that our democracy, such as it is, would not
have survived. Today, as some of us watch in horror, the Indian
government is furiously gyrating its hips, begging the US to
set up its base in India rather than Pakistan. Having had this
ringside view of Pakistan's sordid fate, it isn't just odd, it's
unthinkable, that India should want to do this. Any third world
country with a fragile economy and a complex social base should
know by now that to invite a superpower such as America in (whether
it says it's staying or just passing through) would be like inviting
a brick to drop through your windscreen.
Operation Enduring Freedom is ostensibly being fought to uphold
the American Way of Life. It'll probably end up undermining it
completely. It will spawn more anger and more terror across the
world. For ordinary people in America, it will mean lives lived
in a climate of sickening uncertainty: will my child be safe
in school? Will there be nerve gas in the subway? A bomb in the
cinema hall? Will my love come home tonight? There have been
warnings about the possibility of biological warfare - smallpox,
bubonic plague, anthrax - the deadly payload of innocuous crop-duster
aircraft. Being picked off a few at a time may end up being worse
than being annihilated all at once by a nuclear bomb.
The US government, and no doubt governments all over the world,
will use the climate of war as an excuse to curtail civil liberties,
deny free speech, lay off workers, harass ethnic and religious
minorities, cut back on public spending and divert huge amounts
of money to the defense industry. To what purpose? President
Bush can no more "rid the world of evil-doers" than
he can stock it with saints. It's absurd for the US government
to even toy with the notion that it can stamp out terrorism with
more violence and oppression. Terrorism is the symptom, not the
disease. Terrorism has no country. It's transnational, as global
an enterprise as Coke or Pepsi or Nike. At the first sign of
trouble, terrorists can pull up stakes and move their "factories"
from country to country in search of a better deal. Just like
the multi-nationals.
Terrorism as a phenomenon may never go away. But if it is
to be contained, the first step is for America to at least acknowledge
that it shares the planet with other nations, with other human
beings who, even if they are not on TV, have loves and griefs
and stories and songs and sorrows and, for heaven's sake, rights.
Instead, when Donald Rumsfeld, the US defense secretary, was
asked what he would call a victory in America's new war, he said
that if he could convince the world that Americans must be allowed
to continue with their way of life, he would consider it a victory.
The September 11 attacks were a monstrous calling card from
a world gone horribly wrong. The message may have been written
by Bin Laden (who knows?) and delivered by his couriers, but
it could well have been signed by the ghosts of the victims of
America's old wars. The millions killed in Korea, Vietnam and
Cambodia, the 17,500 killed when Israel - backed by the US -
invaded Lebanon in 1982, the 200,000 Iraqis killed in Operation
Desert Storm, the thousands of Palestinians who have died fighting
Israel's occupation of the West Bank. And the millions who died,
in Yugoslavia, Somalia, Haiti, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador,
the Dominican Republic, Panama, at the hands of all the terrorists,
dictators and genocidists whom the American government supported,
trained, bankrolled and supplied with arms. And this is far from
being a comprehensive list.
For a country involved in so much warfare and conflict, the
American people have been extremely fortunate. The strikes on
September 11 were only the second on American soil in over a
century. The first was Pearl Harbor. The reprisal for this took
a long route, but ended with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This time
the world waits with bated breath for the horrors to come.
Someone recently said that if Osama bin Laden didn't exist,
America would have had to invent him. But, in a way, America
did invent him. He was among the jihadis who moved to Afghanistan
in 1979 when the CIA commenced its operations there. Bin Laden
has the distinction of being created by the CIA and wanted by
the FBI. In the course of a fortnight he has been promoted from
suspect to prime suspect and then, despite the lack of any real
evidence, straight up the charts to being "wanted dead or
alive".
From all accounts, it will be impossible to produce evidence
(of the sort that would stand scrutiny in a court of law) to
link Bin Laden to the September 11 attacks. So far, it appears
that the most incriminating piece of evidence against him is
the fact that he has not condemned them.
From what is known about the location of Bin Laden and the
living conditions in which he operates, it's entirely possible
that he did not personally plan and carry out the attacks - that
he is the inspirational figure, "the CEO of the holding
company". The Taliban's response to US demands for the extradition
of Bin Laden has been uncharacteristically reasonable: produce
the evidence, then we'll hand him over. President Bush's response
is that the demand is "non-negotiable".
(While talks are on for the extradition of CEOs - can India
put in a side request for the extradition of Warren Anderson
of the US? He was the chairman of Union Carbide, responsible
for the Bhopal gas leak that killed 16,000 people in 1984. We
have collated the necessary evidence. It's all in the files.
Could we have him, please?)
But who is Osama bin Laden really? Let me rephrase that. What
is Osama bin Laden? He's America's family secret. The savage
twin of all that purports to be beautiful and civilized. He has
been sculpted from the spare rib of a world laid to waste by
America's foreign policy: its gunboat diplomacy, its nuclear
arsenal, its vulgarly stated policy of "full-spectrum dominance",
its chilling disregard for non-American lives, its barbarous
military interventions, its support for despotic and dictatorial
regimes, its merciless economic agenda that has munched through
the economies of poor countries like a cloud of locusts. Its
marauding multinationals who are taking over the air we breathe,
the ground we stand on, the water we drink, the thoughts we think.
Now that the family secret has been spilled, the twins are blurring
into one another and gradually becoming interchangeable. Their
guns, bombs, money and drugs have been going around in the loop
for a while. (The Stinger missiles that will greet US helicopters
were supplied by the CIA. The heroin used by America's drug addicts
comes from Afghanistan. The Bush administration recently gave
Afghanistan a $43 million subsidy for a "war on drugs"....)
Now Bush and Bin Laden have even begun to borrow each other's
rhetoric. Each refers to the other as "the head of the snake".
Both invoke God and use the loose millenarian currency of good
and evil as their terms of reference. Both are engaged in unequivocal
political crimes. Both are dangerously armed - one with the nuclear
arsenal of the obscenely powerful, the other with the incandescent,
destructive power of the utterly hopeless. The fireball and the
ice pick. The bludgeon and the axe. The important thing to keep
in mind is that neither is an acceptable alternative to the other.
President Bush's ultimatum to the people of the world - "If
you're not with us, you're against us" - is a piece of presumptuous
arrogance. It's not a choice that people want to, need to, or
should have to make.
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