Arundhati Roy is the award-winning author of "A God of Small Things"
This is Roy's Commentary on the Afghani War
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", mobilized 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 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 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 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. Its 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 organization
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, then 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 civilization and savagery, between the
"massacre of innocent people" or, if you like, "a clash of civilizations"
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 mojahedin
for each dead investment banker?
As we watch mesmerized, 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 of the country), 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 destabilize 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 was 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 civilization
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, hard-line 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
globalization, 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, globalization's
structural adjustment programs and drug lords are tearing the country to pieces. Set up to
fight the Soviets, the terrorist training centers 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 and strategic alliances with Pakistan's own political parties.
Now
the US government is asking (asking?) Pakistan to garrote 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 and
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 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 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 Harbor. 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?)
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 civilized.
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 and 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
Back to Current Events Portal: Current events analyzed in order to disclose the indigenous perspective
Back to Green and Indigenous Politics: The Power and Politics of Consciousness