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Page Not FoundWe need to be united in the fight against fascism and repression.
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War is peace. Now we know.
It's only going to get worse.
The Metaphysical Club
U.N. diplomats give Bush a blank check.
Next Stop, Southeast Asia?
The United States may have a new target.
Nation building vs. globalization.
Anthrax is bad, but smallpox is worse — much worse.
At the Gates of Power.
I cannot find the glory in this day.
Patriots and scoundrels.
Appall-o-Meter
Israel's Labor Party is silenced as violence erupts.
Bush administration hawks want to deploy "mini-nukes" against Osama bin Laden.
Under cover of war, the Bush administration pushes for fast track.
Freddy Falls
Green takes the runoff amid charges of race-baiting and miscounted votes.
Crude Justice
Ecuadorian Indians fight Texaco with U.S. tort law.
Punitive Measures
Suffering in solitary confinement.
ART: William Kentridge's animated politics.
Gun Crazy
BOOKS: The story of Arming America.
|
October 26, 2001
New World Disorder
War is peace. Now we know.
NEW DELHI—As darkness deepened over Afghanistan on October 7, the U.S.
government, backed by the International Coalition Against Terror (the new, amenable
substitute for the United Nations), launched air strikes against Afghanistan.
TV channels lingered on computer-animated images of cruise missiles, stealth
bombers, tomahawks and bunker-busting missiles. All over the world, little boys
watched goggle-eyed and stopped clamoring for new video games. The U.N., reduced now to an ineffective acronym, wasn’t even asked to
mandate the air strikes. (As Madeleine Albright once said, “The U.S. acts
multilaterally when it can, and unilaterally when it 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. 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 first use flags to shrink-wrap peoples’
minds and smother real thought, and then as ceremonial shrouds to cover the
mangled remains of the 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 Against Terror.
Or the Taliban. When he announced the air strikes, President George W. Bush said, “We’re
a peaceful nation.” America’s favorite ambassador, Tony Blair (who
also holds the portfolio of British prime minister), echoed him: “We’re
a peaceful people.” Speaking at FBI headquarters a few days later, 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 rejects hate,
rejects violence, rejects murderers and rejects evil. And we will not tire.” Here is a partial list of the countries that America has been at war with—overtly
and covertly—since World War II: China, Korea, Guatemala, Indonesia, Cuba,
the Belgian Congo, Peru, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Grenada, Libya, El Salvador,
Nicaragua, Panama, Iraq, Sudan, Yugoslavia. 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 U.S. 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 largely a cabal of the richest
countries in the world. Between them, they manufacture and sell almost all of
the world’s weapons, and 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 worshiped,
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
land mines in the backwash of the Cold War. Its oldest leaders are in their
early forties. 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 $40 billion 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, they beat,
stone, rape and brutalize women; they don’t seem to know what else to do
with them. Years of war have stripped them of gentleness, inured them to kindness
and human compassion. They dance to the percussive rhythms of bombs raining
down around them. Now they’ve turned their monstrosity on their own people. More than a 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,
U.S. 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, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was asked
if America had run out of targets. “For one thing, we’re finding that
some of the targets we hit need to be re-hit,” he said. “Second, we’re
not running out of targets, Afghanistan is.” This was greeted with gales
of laughter in the Briefing Room.
Among the global powers, there is talk of “putting in a representative
government.” Or, on the other hand, of “restoring” the kingdom
to 89-year-old 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 mujahedin, 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 jalapeño peppers?) Reports have begun to trickle in about civilian casualties, about cities emptying
out as Afghan civilians flock to borders that have been closed. Main arterial
roads have been blown up or sealed off. Those who have experience working in
Afghanistan say that by early November, food convoys will not be able to reach
the millions of Afghans (7.5 million according to the United Nations) 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 U.S. government air-dropped 37,500
packets of emergency rations into Afghanistan. It says it plans to drop a total
of 500,000 packets. That will still add up to only 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 land mines. 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 are 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 spoon, a towelette, a napkin 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 U.S. government’s attempt
to use even this abject misery to boost its self-image, beggars description. 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. With all due respect to President Bush, the people of the world do not have
to choose between the Taliban and the U.S. 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 vs. Evil or Islam vs. Christianity as much as it is about space.
About how to accommodate diversity, how to contain the impulse toward hegemony—economic,
military, linguistic, religious, cultural and otherwise. 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 to prevent it from breathing.
Eventually, it will be torn open. 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 will 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 Bhagavad 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 e-mails
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 U.S. 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. And freedom—that
precious, precious thing—will be the first casualty. It’s already
hurt and hemorrhaging dangerously. 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 United States, have
more or less rolled over, allowing themselves to be tickled on the stomach with
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. Bush recently boasted: “When I take action, I’m not going to fire
a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt. It’s
going to be decisive.” He 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. Then there’s that other branch of traditional coalition business––oil.
Turkmenistan, which borders the northwest of Afghanistan, holds the world’s
fifth largest gas reserves and billions of 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 the U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf
has little to do with its concern for human rights and almost entirely to do
with its strategic interest in oil. For some years now, 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 Southeast Asia. In November 1997, a delegation of
Taliban mullahs traveled to America and even met with State Department officials
in Washington and later with 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. But now comes the U.S. oil industry’s big chance. In America, the arms industry, the oil industry and the major media networks—indeed,
U.S. foreign policy—are all controlled by the same business combines. 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 vs. 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 reimagine beauty without
thinking of the World Trade Center and Afghanistan? Arundhati Roy is the author of The God of Small Things, for which
she received the Booker Prize, and The Cost of Living. Her latest book
of essays, Power Politics, has just been published by South End Press. |
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In These Times is committed to remaining fiercely independent, but we need your help. Donate now to make sure we can continue providing the original reporting, deep investigation, and strategic analysis needed in this moment. We're proud to be in this together.
On
the ground in Afghanistan, the Northern Alliance—the Taliban’s old
enemy, and therefore the coalition’s newest friend—is making headway
in its push to capture Kabul. (Let it be noted that the Northern Alliance’s
track record is not very different from the Taliban’s.) The visible, moderate,
“acceptable” leader of the Alliance, Ahmed Shah Massoud, 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.