This is a clearly articulated understanding
of how the United States is perceived.
This story gets left out of our mass media.
In the aftermath of the unconscionable September 11
suicide attacks on the Pentagon & World Trade Centre,
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 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, assemble, & 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 Centre 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 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 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, 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
civilisation and savagery,
between the "massacre of innocent people"
or, "a clash of civilisations" & "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 mesmerised, 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),
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 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, 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 civilisation 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 $100bn and
$200bn,
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 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 globalisation,
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, 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 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
supported,
funded and propped up for years, has material &
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 & 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 & 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 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 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?)
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 doppelgänger.
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 $43m subsidy for a "war on drugs"....)
Now Bush & 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.
©
Arundhati Roy 2001
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2001 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/saturday_review/story/0,
3605,559756,00.html>