- As darkness deepened over Afghanistan on Sunday October
7 2001, the US government, backed by the International Coalition Against
Terror (the new, amenable surrogate for the United Nations), launched air
strikes against Afghanistan. TV channels lingered on computer-animated
images of cruise missiles, stealth bombers, tomahawks, "bunker-busting"
missiles and Mark 82 high drag bombs. All over the world, little boys watched
goggle-eyed and stopped clamoring for new video games.
-
- The UN, reduced now to an ineffective acronym, wasn't
even asked to mandate the air strikes. (As Madeleine Albright once said,
"We will behave multilaterally when we can, and unilaterally when
we must.") The "evidence" against the terrorists was shared
amongst friends in the "coalition".
-
- After conferring, they announced that it didn't matter
whether or not the "evidence" would stand up in a court of law.
Thus, in an instant, were centuries of jurisprudence carelessly trashed.
-
- Nothing can excuse or justify an act of terrorism, whether
it is committed by religious fundamentalists, private militia, people's
resistance movements - or whether it's dressed up as a war of retribution
by a recognized government. The bombing of Afghanistan is not revenge for
New York and Washington. It is yet another act of terror against the people
of the world.
-
- Each innocent person that is killed must be added to,
not set off against, the grisly toll of civilians who died in New York
and Washington.
-
- People rarely win wars, governments rarely lose them.
People get killed.
-
- Governments molt and regroup, hydra-headed. They use
flags first to shrink-wrap people's minds and smother thought, and then
as ceremonial shrouds to bury their willing dead. On both sides, in Afghanistan
as well as America, civilians are now hostage to the actions of their own
governments.
-
- Unknowingly, ordinary people in both countries share
a common bond - they have to live with the phenomenon of blind, unpredictable
terror. Each batch of bombs that is dropped on Afghanistan is matched by
a corresponding escalation of mass hysteria in America about anthrax, more
hijackings and other terrorist acts.
-
- There is no easy way out of the spiraling morass of terror
and brutality that confronts the world today. It is time now for the human
race to hold still, to delve into its wells of collective wisdom, both
ancient and modern. What happened on September 11 changed the world forever.
-
- Freedom, progress, wealth, technology, war - these words
have taken on new meaning.
-
- Governments have to acknowledge this transformation,
and approach their new tasks with a modicum of honesty and humility. Unfortunately,
up to now, there has been no sign of any introspection from the leaders
of the International Coalition. Or the Taliban.
-
- When he announced the air strikes, President George Bush
said: "We're a peaceful nation." America's favorite ambassador,
Tony Blair, (who also holds the portfolio of prime minister of the UK),
echoed him: "We're a peaceful people."
-
- So now we know. Pigs are horses. Girls are boys. War
is peace.
-
- Speaking at the FBI headquarters a few days later, President
Bush said: "This is our calling. This is the calling of the United
States of America. The most free nation in the world. A nation built on
fundamental values that reject hate, reject violence, rejects murderers
and rejects evil. We will not tire."
-
- Here is a list of the countries that America has been
at war with - and bombed - since the second world war: China (1945-46,
1950-53), Korea (1950-53), Guatemala (1954, 1967-69), Indonesia (1958),
Cuba (1959-60), the Belgian Congo (1964), Peru (1965), Laos (1964-73),
Vietnam (1961-73), Cambodia (1969-70), Grenada (1983), Libya (1986), El
Salvador (1980s), Nicaragua (1980s), Panama (1989), Iraq (1991-99), Bosnia
(1995), Sudan (1998), Yugoslavia (1999). And now Afghanistan.
-
- Certainly it does not tire - this, the most free nation
in the world.
-
- What freedoms does it uphold? Within its borders, the
freedoms of speech, religion, thought; of artistic expression, food habits,
sexual preferences (well, to some extent) and many other exemplary, wonderful
things.
-
- Outside its borders, the freedom to dominate, humiliate
and subjugate - usually in the service of America's real religion, the
"free market". So when the US government christens a war "Operation
Infinite Justice", or "Operation Enduring Freedom", we in
the third world feel more than a tremor of fear.
-
- Because we know that Infinite Justice for some means
Infinite Injustice for others. And Enduring Freedom for some means Enduring
Subjugation for others.
-
- The International Coalition Against Terror is a largely
cabal of the richest countries in the world. Between them, they manufacture
and sell almost all of the world's weapons, they possess the largest stockpile
of weapons of mass destruction - chemical, biological and nuclear. They
have fought the most wars, account for most of the genocide, subjection,
ethnic cleansing and human rights violations in modern history, and have
sponsored, armed and financed untold numbers of dictators and despots.
Between them, they have worshipped, almost deified, the cult of violence
and war. For all its appalling sins, the Taliban just isn't in the same
league.
-
- The Taliban was compounded in the crumbling crucible
of rubble, heroin and landmines in the backwash of the cold war. Its oldest
leaders are in their early 40s. Many of them are disfigured and handicapped,
missing an eye, an arm or a leg. They grew up in a society scarred and
devastated by war.
-
- Between the Soviet Union and America, over 20 years,
about $45bn (£30bn) worth of arms and ammunition was poured into
Afghanistan. The latest weaponry was the only shard of modernity to intrude
upon a thoroughly medieval society.
-
- Young boys - many of them orphans - who grew up in those
times, had guns for toys, never knew the security and comfort of family
life, never experienced the company of women. Now, as adults and rulers,
the Taliban beat, stone, rape and brutalize women, they don't seem to know
what else to do with them.
-
- Years of war has stripped them of gentleness, inured
them to kindness and human compassion. Now they've turned their monstrosity
on their own people.
-
- They dance to the percussive rhythms of bombs raining
down around them.
-
- With all due respect to President Bush, the people of
the world do not have to choose between the Taliban and the US government.
All the beauty of human civilization - our art, our music, our literature
- lies beyond these two fundamentalist, ideological poles. There is as
little chance that the people of the world can all become middle-class
consumers as there is that they will all embrace any one particular religion.
The issue is not about good v evil or Islam v Christianity as much as it
is about space. About how to accommodate diversity, how to contain the
impulse towards hegemony - every kind of hegemony, economic, military,
linguistic, religious and cultural.
-
- Any ecologist will tell you how dangerous and fragile
a monoculture is. A hegemonic world is like having a government without
a healthy opposition. It becomes a kind of dictatorship. It's like putting
a plastic bag over the world, and preventing it from breathing. Eventually,
it will be torn open.
-
- One and a half million Afghan people lost their lives
in the 20 years of conflict that preceded this new war. Afghanistan was
reduced to rubble, and now, the rubble is being pounded into finer dust.
By the second day of the air strikes, US pilots were returning to their
bases without dropping their assigned payload of bombs. As one pilot put
it, Afghanistan is "not a target-rich environment". At a press
briefing at the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld, the US defense secretary, was
asked if America had run out of targets.
-
- "First we're going to re-hit targets," he said,
"and second, we're not running out of targets, Afghanistan is ..."
This was greeted with gales of laughter in the briefing room.
-
- By the third day of the strikes, the US defense department
boasted that it had "achieved air supremacy over Afghanistan"
(Did they mean that they had destroyed both, or maybe all 16, of Afghanistan's
planes?)
-
- On the ground in Afghanistan, the Northern Alliance -
the Taliban's old enemy, and therefore the international coalition's newest
friend - is making headway in its push to capture Kabul. (For the archives,
let it be said that the Northern Alliance's track record is not very different
from the Taliban's. But for now, because it's inconvenient, that little
detail is being glossed over.) The visible, moderate, "acceptable"
leader of the alliance, Ahmed Shah Masud, was killed in a suicide-bomb
attack early in September. The rest of the Northern Alliance is a brittle
confederation of brutal warlords, ex-communists and unbending clerics.
It is a disparate group divided along ethnic lines, some of whom have tasted
power in Afghanistan in the past.
-
- Until the US air strikes, the Northern Alliance controlled
about 5% of the geographical area of Afghanistan. Now, with the coalition's
help and "air cover", it is poised to topple the Taliban. Meanwhile,
Taliban soldiers, sensing imminent defeat, have begun to defect to the
alliance. So the fighting forces are busy switching sides and changing
uniforms. But in an enterprise as cynical as this one, it seems to matter
hardly at all.
-
- Love is hate, north is south, peace is war.
-
- Among the global powers, there is talk of "putting
in a representative government". Or, on the other hand, of "restoring"
the kingdom to Afghanistan's 89-year old former king Zahir Shah, who has
lived in exile in Rome since 1973. That's the way the game goes - support
Saddam Hussein, then "take him out"; finance the mojahedin, then
bomb them to smithereens; put in Zahir Shah and see if he's going to be
a good boy. (Is it possible to "put in" a representative government?
Can you place an order for democracy - with extra cheese and jalapeno peppers?)
-
- Reports have begun to trickle in about civilian casualties,
about cities emptying out as Afghan civilians flock to the borders which
have been closed. Main arterial roads have been blown up or sealed off.
Those who have experience of working in Afghanistan say that by early November,
food convoys will not be able to reach the millions of Afghans (7.5m, according
to the UN) who run the very real risk of starving to death during the course
of this winter. They say that in the days that are left before winter sets
in, there can either be a war, or an attempt to reach food to the hungry.
Not both.
-
- As a gesture of humanitarian support, the US government
air-dropped 37,000 packets of emergency rations into Afghanistan. It says
it plans to drop a total of 500,000 packets. That will still only add up
to a single meal for half a million people out of the several million in
dire need of food.
-
- Aid workers have condemned it as a cynical, dangerous,
public-relations exercise. They say that air-dropping food packets is worse
than futile.
-
- First, because the food will never get to those who really
need it. More dangerously, those who run out to retrieve the packets risk
being blown up by landmines. A tragic alms race.
-
- Nevertheless, the food packets had a photo-op all to
themselves. Their contents were listed in major newspapers. They were vegetarian,
we're told, as per Muslim dietary law (!) Each yellow packet, decorated
with the American flag, contained: rice, peanut butter, bean salad, strawberry
jam, crackers, raisins, flat bread, an apple fruit bar, seasoning, matches,
a set of plastic cutlery, a serviette and illustrated user instructions.
-
- After three years of unremitting drought, an air-dropped
airline meal in Jalalabad! The level of cultural ineptitude, the failure
to understand what months of relentless hunger and grinding poverty really
mean, the US government's attempt to use even this abject misery to boost
its self-image, beggars description.
-
- Reverse the scenario for a moment. Imagine if the Taliban
government was to bomb New York City, saying all the while that its real
target was the US government and its policies. And suppose, during breaks
between the bombing, the Taliban dropped a few thousand packets containing
nan and kebabs impaled on an Afghan flag. Would the good people of New
York ever find it in themselves to forgive the Afghan government? Even
if they were hungry, even if they needed the food, even if they ate it,
how would they ever forget the insult, the condescension? Rudi Guiliani,
Mayor of New York City, returned a gift of $10m from a Saudi prince because
it came with a few words of friendly advice about American policy in the
Middle East. Is pride a luxury that only the rich are entitled to?
-
- Far from stamping it out, igniting this kind of rage
is what creates terrorism. Hate and retribution don't go back into the
box once you've let them out. For every "terrorist" or his "supporter"
that is killed, hundreds of innocent people are being killed too. And for
every hundred innocent people killed, there is a good chance that several
future terrorists will be created.
-
- Where will it all lead?
-
- Setting aside the rhetoric for a moment, consider the
fact that the world has not yet found an acceptable definition of what
"terrorism" is. One country's terrorist is too often another's
freedom fighter. At the heart of the matter lies the world's deep-seated
ambivalence towards violence.
-
- Once violence is accepted as a legitimate political instrument,
then the morality and political acceptability of terrorists (insurgents
or freedom fighters) becomes contentious, bumpy terrain. The US government
itself has funded, armed and sheltered plenty of rebels and insurgents
around the world.
-
- The CIA and Pakistan's ISI trained and armed the mojahedin
who, in the 80s, were seen as terrorists by the government in Soviet-occupied
Afghanistan. Today, Pakistan - America's ally in this new war - sponsors
insurgents who cross the border into Kashmir in India. Pakistan lauds them
as "freedom-fighters", India calls them "terrorists".
India, for its part, denounces countries who sponsor and abet terrorism,
but the Indian army has, in the past, trained separatist Tamil rebels asking
for a homeland in Sri Lanka - the LTTE, responsible for countless acts
of bloody terrorism.
-
- (Just as the CIA abandoned the mujahideen after they
had served its purpose, India abruptly turned its back on the LTTE for
a host of political reasons. It was an enraged LTTE suicide bomber who
assassinated former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1989.)
-
- It is important for governments and politicians to understand
that manipulating these huge, raging human feelings for their own narrow
purposes may yield instant results, but eventually and inexorably, they
have disastrous consequences. Igniting and exploiting religious sentiments
for reasons of political expediency is the most dangerous legacy that governments
or politicians can bequeath to any people - including their own.
-
- People who live in societies ravaged by religious or
communal bigotry know that every religious text - from the Bible to the
Bhagwad Gita - can be mined and misinterpreted to justify anything, from
nuclear war to genocide to corporate globalization.
-
- This is not to suggest that the terrorists who perpetrated
the outrage on September 11 should not be hunted down and brought to book.
They must be.
-
- But is war the best way to track them down? Will burning
the haystack find you the needle? Or will it escalate the anger and make
the world a living hell for all of us?
-
- At the end of the day, how many people can you spy on,
how many bank accounts can you freeze, how many conversations can you eavesdrop
on, how many emails can you intercept, how many letters can you open, how
many phones can you tap? Even before September 11, the CIA had accumulated
more information than is humanly possible to process. (Sometimes, too much
data can actually hinder intelligence - small wonder the US spy satellites
completely missed the preparation that preceded India's nuclear tests in
1998.)
-
- The sheer scale of the surveillance will become a logistical,
ethical and civil rights nightmare. It will drive everybody clean crazy.
And freedom - that precious, precious thing - will be the first casualty.
It's already hurt and hemorrhaging dangerously.
-
- Governments across the world are cynically using the
prevailing paranoia to promote their own interests. All kinds of unpredictable
political forces are being unleashed. In India, for instance, members of
the All India People's Resistance Forum, who were distributing anti-war
and anti-US pamphlets in Delhi, have been jailed. Even the printer of the
leaflets was arrested.
-
- The right-wing government (while it shelters Hindu extremists
groups such as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal) has banned
the Islamic Students Movement of India and is trying to revive an anti-
terrorist Act which had been withdrawn after the Human Rights Commission
reported that it had been more abused than used. Millions of Indian citizens
are Muslim. Can anything be gained by alienating them?
-
- Every day that the war goes on, raging emotions are being
let loose into the world. The international press has little or no independent
access to the war zone. In any case, mainstream media, particularly in
the US, have more or less rolled over, allowing themselves to be tickled
on the stomach with press handouts from military men and government officials.
Afghan radio stations have been destroyed by the bombing. The Taliban has
always been deeply suspicious of the press. In the propaganda war, there
is no accurate estimate of how many people have been killed, or how much
destruction has taken place. In the absence of reliable information, wild
rumors spread.
-
- Put your ear to the ground in this part of the world,
and you can hear the thrumming, the deadly drumbeat of burgeoning anger.
Please. Please, stop the war now. Enough people have died. The smart missiles
are just not smart enough. They're blowing up whole warehouses of suppressed
fury.
-
- President George Bush recently boasted, "When I
take action, I'm not going to fire a $2m missile at a $10 empty tent and
hit a camel in the butt. It's going to be decisive." President Bush
should know that there are no targets in Afghanistan that will give his
missiles their money's worth.
-
- Perhaps, if only to balance his books, he should develop
some cheaper missiles to use on cheaper targets and cheaper lives in the
poor countries of the world. But then, that may not make good business
sense to the coalition's weapons manufacturers. It wouldn't make any sense
at all, for example, to the Carlyle Group - described by the Industry Standard
as "the world's largest private equity firm", with $13bn under
management.
-
- Carlyle invests in the defense sector and makes its money
from military conflicts and weapons spending.
-
- Carlyle is run by men with impeccable credentials. Former
US defense secretary Frank Carlucci is Carlyle's chairman and managing
director (he was a college roommate of Donald Rumsfeld's). Carlyle's other
partners include former US secretary of state James A Baker III, George
Soros and Fred Malek (George Bush Sr's campaign manager). An American paper
- the Baltimore Chronicle and Sentinel - says that former president George
Bush Sr is reported to be seeking investments for the Carlyle Group from
Asian markets.
-
- He is reportedly paid not inconsiderable sums of money
to make "presentations" to potential government-clients.
-
- Ho hum. As the tired saying goes, it's all in the family.
-
- Then there's that other branch of traditional family
business - oil. Remember, President George Bush (Jr) and Vice-President
Dick Cheney both made their fortunes working in the US oil industry.
-
- Turkmenistan, which borders the north-west of Afghanistan,
holds the world's third largest gas reserves and an estimated six billion
barrels of oil reserves. Enough, experts say, to meet American energy needs
for the next 30 years (or a developing country's energy requirements for
a couple of centuries.) America has always viewed oil as a security consideration,
and protected it by any means it deems necessary. Few of us doubt that
its military presence in the Gulf has little to do with its concern for
human rights and almost entirely to do with its strategic interest in oil.
-
- Oil and gas from the Caspian region currently moves northward
to European markets. Geographically and politically, Iran and Russia are
major impediments to American interests. In 1998, Dick Cheney - then CEO
of Halliburton, a major player in the oil industry - said, "I can't
think of a time when we've had a region emerge as suddenly to become as
strategically significant as the Caspian. It's almost as if the opportunities
have arisen overnight." True enough.
-
- For some years now, an American oil giant called Unocal
has been negotiating with the Taliban for permission to construct an oil
pipeline through Afghanistan to Pakistan and out to the Arabian sea. From
here, Unocal hopes to access the lucrative "emerging markets"
in south and south-east Asia. In December 1997, a delegation of Taliban
mullahs traveled to America and even met US state department officials
and Unocal executives in Houston. At that time the Taliban's taste for
public executions and its treatment of Afghan women were not made out to
be the crimes against humanity that they are now.
-
- Over the next six months, pressure from hundreds of outraged
American feminist groups was brought to bear on the Clinton administration.
-
- Fortunately, they managed to scuttle the deal. And now
comes the US oil industry's big chance.
-
- In America, the arms industry, the oil industry, the
major media networks, and, indeed, US foreign policy, are all controlled
by the same business combines. Therefore, it would be foolish to expect
this talk of guns and oil and defense deals to get any real play in the
media. In any case, to a distraught, confused people whose pride has just
been wounded, whose loved ones have been tragically killed, whose anger
is fresh and sharp, the inanities about the "clash of civilizations"
and the "good v evil" discourse home in unerringly. They are
cynically doled out by government spokesmen like a daily dose of vitamins
or anti-depressants. Regular medication ensures that mainland America continues
to remain the enigma it has always been - a curiously insular people, administered
by a pathologically meddlesome, promiscuous government.
-
- And what of the rest of us, the numb recipients of this
onslaught of what we know to be preposterous propaganda? The daily consumers
of the lies and brutality smeared in peanut butter and strawberry jam being
air-dropped into our minds just like those yellow food packets. Shall we
look away and eat because we're hungry, or shall we stare unblinking at
the grim theater unfolding in Afghanistan until we retch collectively and
say, in one voice, that we have had enough?
-
- As the first year of the new millennium rushes to a close,
one wonders - have we forfeited our right to dream? Will we ever be able
to re-imagine beauty?
-
- Will it be possible ever again to watch the slow, amazed
blink of a newborn gecko in the sun, or whisper back to the marmot who
has just whispered in your ear - without thinking of the World Trade Center
and Afghanistan?
-
- © Arundhati Roy
-
- Arundhati Roy, forty-one, is the author of The God of
Small Things (Random House, 1997), which won the Booker Prize, sold six
million copies, and has been translated into forty languages. Here is link
to an interview with Arundhati in the April 2001 issue of The Progressive
Magazine: http://www.theprogressive.org/intv0401.html
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