by Arundhati Roy
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", mobilised its army, its airforce, 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,
its 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 W.
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 the American public that America's 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-goers in the days and weeks that followed 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 and 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 organisation 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 know it. In the absence of information, politicians,
political commentators, 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 -Operation Infinite Justice - it would
help if some small clarifications are made. For example, Infinite Justice 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 5 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 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." Madeleine 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 civilisation and savagery,
between the 'massacre of innocent people' or, if you like, 'a clash of civilisations'
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
mujahideen for each dead investment
banker?
As we watch mesmerised, Operation Infinite Justice 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 landmines -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. 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.
By contributing to the killing of Afghan civilians, the US government will only
end up helping the Taliban cause. 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 Afghanistan), 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 jehad, which would turn Muslim countries
within the Soviet Union against the Communist regime and eventually destabilise
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, the CIA funded and recruited
almost 100,000 radical mujahideen from 40 Islamic countries as soldiers for
America's proxy war. The rank and file of the mujahideen were unaware that their
jehad 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). By 1989, after being bloodied
by 10 years of relentless conflict, the Russians withdrew, leaving behind a
civilisation reduced to rubble. Civil war in Afghanistan raged on. The jehad
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 mujahideen ordered farmers to plant opium as '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 on
American streets. The annual profits, said to be between 100 and 200
billion dollars, were ploughed 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 akistan. 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,
enforced Sharia laws in 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 neo-capitalism and corporate globalisation, again dominated
by America. And now
Afghanistan is poised to be 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. There
are three million Afghan refugees living in tented camps along the border. Pakistan's
economy is crumbling. Sectarian violence, globalisation's Structural Adjustment
programmes and drug lords are tearing the country to pieces. Set up to fight
the Soviets, the terrorist training centres and madrassas, sown like dragon's
teeth across the country, produced fundamentalists with tremendous popular appeal
within Pakistan itself. The Taliban, who the Pakistan government has
supported, 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 garrot 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 like America
in (whether it says it's staying or just passing through) would be like inviting
a brick to drop through your windscreen.
In the media blitz that followed the September 11 events, no mainstream TV station
thought it fit to tell the story of America's involvement with Afghanistan.
So, to those unfamiliar with the story,
the coverage of the attacks could have been moving, disturbing and perhaps to
cynics, self-indulgent. However, to those of us who are familiar with Afghanistan's
recent history, American television coverage and the rhetoric of the "International
Coalition Against Terror" is just plain insulting. America's 'free press'
like its 'free market' has a lot to account for. Operation Infinite Justice
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?
Already CNN is warning people against the possibility of biological warfare
small pox, bubonic plague, anthrax being waged by 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 defence industry. To what purpose? President
George 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 multinationals.
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 Defence 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
Osama 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 2,00,000 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 who 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 Harbour. 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 jehadis
who moved to Afghanistan in 1979 when the CIA commenced operations. Osama 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 Osama 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 and the living conditions
from
which Osama bin Laden 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 Osama bin Laden
has been uncharacteristically reasonable: Produce the evidence, we'll hand him
over. President Bush's response is that the demand is "non-negotiable".
(While talks are on for the extradition of CEO, can
India put in a side-request for the extradition of Warren Anderson of the USA?
He was 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
he 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. He is the American President's dark doppelganger.
The savage twin of all that purports to be beautiful and civilised. 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
they've 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.