Ê

 'Brutality smeared

       in peanut butter'

Why America must stop the war now.

 

By Arundhati Roy

Guardian Unlimited

Tuesday October 23, 2001

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 clamouring 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 didn1t 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 recognised 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 moult 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 spiralling 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."

America1s favourite 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 & 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),

 El Salvador (1980s),

Nicaragua (1980s),

Grenada (1983),

Libya (1986),

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 (to some extent)

and many other exemplary, wonderful things.

Outside its borders, the freedom to dominate,

humiliate and subjugate ­

usually in the service of America1s 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 brutalise 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 civilisation -

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.

It1s 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 defence 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 defence 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 government1s 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

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

anotherâs 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 globalisation.

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.

- 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 haemorrhaging 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 rightwing 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 rumours 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 coalition1s 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 defence sector and makes its money

from military conflicts and weapons spending.

Carlyle is run by men with impeccable credentials.

Former US defence 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

travelled 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 defence 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 civilisations"

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 theatre 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 Centre and Afghanistan?

© Arundhati Roy

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001